LA Tech Week: The Auctioning of an NFT From AI LA
A Custom Home Built in 33 Days
In the suburbs of Silver Lake, Cover — a technology company that builds custom backyard homes is showcasing their latest, life-size lego abode. Their latest $270,000 accessory dwelling unit (ADU) is built atop a garage on a slanted hill that required some standard contracting work. But other than laying the concrete foundation every other part of this home was built in Cover’s new 80,000 square feet factory in Gardena.
If Tesla was in the home-building business, this is what it would look like.
“Our approach is similar to Tesla,” says Cover’s technological advisor to the CEO Rico Jaeggi. “Start with high-end products then, through scaling we can bring the cost down.” In other words, as a few of their other employees tell me, Cover’s current model is equivalent to Tesla’s roadster.
The idea is to streamline the homebuilding process so that, “if you work an eight-hour job, you never see us in your backyard,” says Jaeggi. In other words, with Cover you’ll never have to worry about seeing a contractor drop a stack of lumber in your backyard then disappear for a few weeks.
The 550 square-foot, single-room home I’m touring was built in 33 days. The bathroom is aseptic and white and the paneling on the ceiling–also white–can be unscrewed and removed like a car bumper in case there’s a leak. Cover co-founder Alexis Rivas tells me that although the homes are built on production lines using algorithms, the layouts are custom.
“You can move the door to this side of the home and you can put the bathroom and the kitchen anywhere you want,” he adds.
On my way out, the valet attendant who works in construction asks what I thought of the house. I tell him it looks good. That his job might soon be automated and, instead of laboring in the sun, he may be working behind a computer for a software company. He looks at me like I just told him he’s had a death in the family. Then he shakes his head. “Nah man,” he says. “That ain’t me.”
The VC Fund in Silver Lake
Inside a small office space that was recently vacated by reselling platform Depop, Worklife Ventures is hosting one of only a handful of L.A. Tech Week events on the Eastside of Los Angeles.
“They [presumably the folks that helped put on L.A. Tech Week] encouraged us to relocate our event to the Westside, but the Eastside is the heart of L.A.,” says Brian Yip, head of marketing at Worklife.
The small studio space looks like what you’d imagine from a V.C. fund aiming for some Silver Lake street cred: a panel of vinyl records, recessed ceilings coated in yellow paint and a Cup Noodles placard the size of a movie poster hanging on the wall. The event is jam-packed and Nelly’s “Country Grammar” blaring through the speakers makes it difficult to hear anyone say anything.
Currently, the space features merch from Canadian YouTuber Cody Ko. Last month, Yip tells me, they hosted Grailed superseller 4Gseller for an in-person retail pop-up. Worklife, per Yip, is a fund aimed at helping to connect digital communities in real life.
Inside Worklife’s Silver Lake studio, I also meet Joshua Blackwell, founder of Blck Unicrn — a Web3 project he describes as Netflix meets Spotify. Blackwell further explains that the idea is “to bring stories to life via immersive experiences and through augmented reality.” For example, he continues, “what if the ‘Thriller’ video kept going and you could be in the house with the zombies?” In other words, Blackwell says, “the concept is to mix the concert experience with the immersive nature of being inside an escape room.”
His idea sounds promising. If it were me though, I’d maybe consider reframing the pitch.
Auctioning an NFT of an AI’s Interpretation of LA
A few blocks from Downtown Los Angeles’s Skid Row, where roughly 8,000 men and women live in encampments, sits the steel and glass 1010 Wilshire building guarded by a brass Buddha statue as tall as a middling palm tree. On 1010’s labyrinthine rooftop, AI LA is hosting its luxurious $150 per ticket ($250 for V.I.P.) Fun for Funds Festival to promote AI literacy in the city of Los Angeles.
Here, the ills that plague society have been given the NFT treatment: Five 10x4 feet screens display glittering images with a variable backstory. Their similarity to a Microsoft music visualizer circa Windows 2000 is uncanny.
Each screen represents a different district in Los Angeles, something participants learn after they’ve scanned the screen-adjacent QR code. Each district has a 15-second clip from the NFT collection. The first display– or “District 1” as it’s referred to–covers Downtown and East L.A. According to the information drawn from the QR code, the main challenge in District 1 is “access to quality jobs, retail stores and perhaps most importantly—food.”
This being an AI event, the solution, as suggested by the information drawn from the QR code, is reinventing the supply chain “through smart supply systems” and via “AI-based monitoring.”
So what do the mashing molecules on the screen have to do with any of this? James Macion, the data analyst tasked with pulling public data and grouping the data into themes tried his best to put it in terms I can understand.
“For example, District 4 represents racial equity,” says Macion. So Macion pulled data sets related to racial equity: population, education, social depression and language. The data was then given to award-winning independent media studio Ouchhh to create AI-generated NFTs. In other words, the psychedelic renderings are the visual incarnation of the data that tells us everything that’s wrong with our society. The idea, Macion says, was to make the AI-generated art, “homegrown for L.A.”
According to the summary of “District 3’s” future, AI predictive models will play a role in “anticipating housing needs of individuals who are encountering circumstances that may cause them to be unhoused and connecting them to relevant resources before they become unhoused.” This is all to suggest that AI is the future and it’s here to save the world from suffering.
The event is the brainchild of AI LA’s founder, president and executive director Todd Terrazas, who tells me that AI LA’s goal–among other things–is to promote AI literacy to “fewer white guys.” The way he plans to do this is by piloting AI literacy programs in community colleges where students of color comprise 60% of enrollment.
Early in the evening, Terrazas promises that when the sun goes down the screens will change. That they will then display one-of-one NFTs produced by Ouchhh that will soon travel to a Mozilla conference in Hawaii and that the attendants of the AI LA event can bid on to become owners of the NFT.
The other major AI enterprise at the event is Jeremy Fojut’s friendship-finding platform Like|Minded. After diving into psychological research about friendship and personalities, Fojut, also the co-founder of NEWaukee, known for hosting community events in Milwaukee, turned his attention to developing a platform that uses a personality assessment to match individuals within an organization to help them form meaningful connections and increase their engagement within their company.
The algorithm is based on HEXACO, a personality inventory that assesses a person's honesty, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness. Fojut promises the algorithm won’t lead to issues oft-associated with group think or conformity since the algorithm “doesn’t define your entire identity, but rather highlights the parts of you that are most present in your worldview and interactions with other people.”
Perhaps even more compelling is Like|Minded’s use in establishing mentorships within organizations by leveraging the inverse of the algorithm to match people, which Fojut refers to as “growth matches.”
An hour or so before nightfall, Stephen Piron is staring at an installation of old TVs of variable sizes displaying the footage of cameras recording different parts of the party. Piron is the founder of Dessa — acquired by Square in 2016 and famous for creating deep fakes, the most notable of which was a Joe Rogan clip that went viral in 2019. Piron is a veteran of the deep learning space and he seems eager to leave this party. But not before he tells me about how he and his colleagues at Dessa tripped and fell onto their AI-generated deep-fake notoriety.
“It was an accident,” he says. They were bored working on projects that helped banks detect fraud, so, he says, “some of us started working on this other thing.”
Near the end of the evening, as promised, the NFT auction begins when the electric-blue NFT graphic transforms into an abstract red, white and black animation. The bidding begins at $500.
“If you don’t buy this for $500,” begins the auctioneer, comedian Alli Goldberg. “You’re a broke bitch and we hate you.”
The bidding on the first of five, one-of-one NFTs reaches $4,300. From the ground floor, I can still hear the auctioneer as I exit the building.
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Image Source: Observable Space