LA Tech Week: Auction 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 showing off its latest life-size Lego home. Their latest $270,000 accessory dwelling unit (ADU) is built on top of a garage on a sloped hill that required some standard contractor work. But aside from laying the concrete foundation, every other part of this home was built in Cover’s new 80,000-square-foot factory in Gardena.

If Tesla were in the home building business, this is what it would look like.

“Our approach is similar to Tesla,” says Cover’s technology advisor to CEO Rico Jaeggi. “Start with advanced products, then through scaling we can bring costs down.” In other words, as some of the other employees tell me, Cover’s current model is the equivalent of Tesla’s roadster.

The idea is to streamline the home building process so that “if you’re working an eight-hour job, you’ll never see us in your yard,” says Jaeggi. In other words, with Cover you’ll never have to worry about seeing a contractor drop a stack of logs in your yard and then disappear for a few weeks.

The 550 square foot one bedroom home I travel to visit was built in 33 days. The bathroom is aseptic and white, and the panel on the ceiling – also white – can be unscrewed and removed like a car bumper in case of a leak. Cover co-founder Alexis Rivas tells me that while 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 kitchen anywhere you want,” he adds.

On the way out, the officer who works in the construction asks what I thought of the house. I tell him it looks good. That his job could soon be automated, and instead of working in the sun, he could 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. “No man,” he says. “It’s not me.”

The VC fund in Silver Lake

Inside a small office space recently vacated by resale platform Depop, Worklife Ventures is hosting one of only a handful of LA Tech Week events on the east side of Los Angeles.

“The [presumably the folks that helped put on L.A. Tech Week] encouraged us to move our event to the Westside, but the Eastside is the heart of LA,” says Brian Yip, Marketing Manager at Worklife.

The small studio space looks like what you’d imagine from a VC fund aiming for Silver Lake street cred: a panel of vinyl records, recessed ceilings coated in yellow paint, and a Cup Noodles poster the size of a movie poster hanging from the wall. The event is packed, and Nelly’s “Country Grammar” blasting through the speakers makes it hard to hear anyone say anything.

Currently, the space features merchandise from Canadian YouTuber Cody Ko. Last month, Yip says, they hosted Grailed superseller 4Gseller for a personal retail pop-up. Worklife, per Yip, is a fund that aims to help 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 continued and you could be in the house with the zombies?” In other words, says Blackwell, “the concept is to blend the concert experience with the immersive nature of being inside an escape room.”

His idea sounds promising. But if it were me, I might consider changing course.

Auctioning an NFT of an AI’s interpretation of LA

A few blocks from downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where roughly 8,000 men and women live in camps, the steel and glass building 1010 Wilshire stands guarded by a brass Buddha statue as tall as a medium-sized palm tree. On 1010’s labyrinthine rooftop, AI LA hosts its luxurious $150 per ticket ($250 for VIP) Fun for Funds Festival to promote AI knowledge in the city of Los Angeles.

Here, the problems plaguing society have been given the NFT treatment: Five 10×4-foot screens show glittering images with a variable background. Their resemblance to a Microsoft music visualization circa Windows 2000 is uncanny.

Each screen represents a different district of Los Angeles, which participants learn after scanning the QR code next to the screen. The first display – or “District 1” as it’s referred to – covers Downtown and East LA According to the information gleaned from the QR code, the main challenge in District 1 is “access to quality jobs, retail and perhaps most importantly – food.”

This is an AI event, and the solution, as suggested by the information extracted from the QR code, is reinventing the supply chain “through smart supply systems” and via “AI-based monitoring.”

So what do the mash 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 into words I could understand.

“For example, District 4 represents racial equality,” Macion says. So Macion pulled data sets related to racial equality: 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 is wrong with our society. The idea, says Macion, was to create the AI-generated art, “homemade for LA”

According to the summary of “District 3’s” future, AI predictive models will play a role in “anticipating the housing needs of individuals facing circumstances that may cause them to become homeless and connecting them to relevant resources before they become homeless.” All this suggests that AI is the future and that it is here to save the world from suffering.

The event is the brainchild of AI LA founder, president and CEO Todd Terrazas, who tells me that AI LA’s goal — among other things — is to promote AI skills to “fewer white guys.” The way he plans to do this is by piloting AI skills programs at colleges where students of color make up 60% of enrollment.

In the early evening, Terrazas promises that when the sun goes down the screens will change. That they will then show one-of-a-kind NFTs produced by Ouchh that will soon travel to a Mozilla conference in Hawaii and that the participants of the AI ​​LA event can bid to become owners of NFTs.

The other major AI company at the event is Jeremy Fojut’s friendship platform Like|Minded. After delving into psychological research on friendships 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 commitment to the company.

The algorithm is based on HEXACO, a personality inventory that assesses a person’s honesty, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness. Fojut promises that the algorithm will not lead to problems often associated with groupthink or conformity since the algorithm “does not 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 of establishing mentorship in organizations by leveraging the opposite of the algorithm to match people, which Fojut refers to as “growth matchers.”

An hour or so before night falls, Stephen Piron stares at an installation of old TVs of varying sizes showing the footage of cameras recording different parts of the party. Piron is the founder of Dessa – acquired by Square in 2016 and known for creating deep spoofs, 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 stumbled and fell on their AI-generated deeply fake notoriety.

It was an accident, he says. They were tired of 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 as the electric-blue NFT graphic transforms into an abstract red, white and black animation. Bidding starts at $500.

“If you don’t buy this for $500,” the auctioneer begins. “You’re a broke bitch and we hate you.”

Bidding on the first of five, one-of-one NFTs reaches $2,000. From the ground floor I can still hear the auctioneer when I leave the building.