LA Tech Week: Super Article on Squeezing the Lime on Globalization 101

A custom home built in 33 days

On the shores of Silver Lake, Cover – a tech company that builds custom backyard homes – is showing off their latest, life-size Lego abode. Their latest $270,000 accessory dwelling unit (ADU) was built over a garage on a sloping hillside, requiring formal contracting work. But other than pouring the concrete foundation, every part of this house was built at the roof’s new 80,000-square-foot factory in Gardena.

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

“Our approach is similar to Tesla,” said Rico Jaggi, CEO of technology consultancy Cover. “Let’s start with high-end products, and then we can reduce the operating costs.” In other words, as some of their other employees tell me, the current model of the range is the equivalent of a Tesla Roadster.

The idea is to streamline the home building process so that “if you work eight hours, you’ll never see us in your backyard.” In other words, with coverage you’ll never have to worry about seeing a contractor drop a pile of wood in your backyard and disappear for a few weeks.

The 550 square foot one bedroom house I am visiting was built in 33 days. The bathroom is aseptic and white and the paneling on the ceiling – also white – can be loosened if there is a leak and removed like a car bumper. As the founder of the cover, Alexis Rivas, told me, although the houses are built on production lines using an algorithm, the layouts are familiar.

“You can move the door on this side of the house and you can put the bathroom and kitchen wherever you want,” he added.

When I left, the valet attendant who worked in construction asked me what I thought of the house. I said it looks good. The work will soon be automated and instead of working in the sun, he may be working behind a computer in a software company. He looks at me like I told him he died in the family. Then he shook his head. “Hey man,” he says. “That’s not me.”

VC Fund in Silver Lake

In a small office space recently vacated by selling platform Depop, Worklife Ventures is hosting one of the few LA Tech Week events on the east side of Los Angeles.

“they [presumably the folks that helped put on L.A. Tech Week] “He encouraged us to move our event to the Westside, but the Eastside is the heart of LA,” said Brian Yip, chief marketing officer at WorkLife.

The tiny studio space looks like what you’d expect from a VC fund pitching for some Silver Lake Street credits: a panel of vinyl records, a yellow-painted ceiling, and a wall hanging the size of a Trophy Noodle movie poster. . The show is packed and Nelly’s “Country Grammar” is blaring through the speakers making it hard to hear anyone speaking.

The site currently features production from Canadian YouTuber Cody Co. Last month, Yip told me, they hosted their own retail pop-up Grailed Superseller 4Gseller. Worklife, per Yip, is a fund aimed at connecting digital communities in real life.

In WorkLife’s Silver Lake studio, I meet Joshua Blackwell, founder of Blck Unicrn – the Web3 project that Netflix says will connect with Spotify. Blackwell explains that the idea is to “bring stories to life through immersive experiences and realism.” For example, he continued, “What if the ‘Thriller’ video continued and you were in a house with zombies?” In other words, says Blackwell, “the concept is to combine the concert experience with the immersive nature of an escape room.”

His idea sounds promising. If it were me, I’d probably consider adjusting the volume.

The definition of LA is to sell NFT at auction

A few blocks from Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where about 8,000 men and women live in camps, sit at 1010 Wilshire Steel and Glass, guarded by a bronze Buddha statue like a middle-aged palm tree. On the rooftop of 1010’s Lab, AI LA is hosting a $150 per ticket ($250 for VIP) fun fundraiser to promote AI literacy in the city of Los Angeles.

Here, the ills that plague society are given the NFT treatment: five 10×4-foot screens project glowing images with dynamic backgrounds. Their similarities to Microsoft Music Visual for Windows 2000 are striking.

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

As this is an AI phenomenon, the solution is reinventing the supply chain with “modern supply systems” and “AI-based tracking,” as suggested by the information from the QR code.

So what do the mashing molecules on the screen have to do with these things? James McKeon, the data analyst tasked with pulling public data and grouping the data into themes, did his best to put it into understandable terms.

“For example, District 4 represents racial equality,” Massion says. So McKeon pulled data sets related to racial inequality: population, education, social anxiety, and language. The data was provided to award-winning independent media studio Ouchh to create AI-generated NFTs. In other words, psychedelic interpretation is the visual embodiment of the information that tells us everything that is wrong with our society. The idea, Massion says, is AI-generated art, “home growing for LA.”

According to “District 3’s” Future Summary, AI predictive models will play a role in “predicting the housing needs of individuals experiencing homelessness and connecting them to relevant resources before they become homeless.” All this is to suggest that AI is the future and is here to save the world from suffering.

The event is the brainchild of AI LA founder, president and CEO Todd Terrazas, who told me that AI LA’s goal is–among other things–to advance AI knowledge to “little white people.” The way he plans to do this is by piloting AI literacy programs at community colleges where students of color make up 60 percent.

At the beginning of the evening, Terrazas promises that the screens will change when the sun sets. Attendees of the recent Mozilla conference in Hawaii and attendees of the AI ​​LA event will be bidding to own an NFT, showing one-of-a-kind NFTs made by Ouchh.

Another major AI enterprise at the event is Jeremy Fojut’s dating platform Like|Minded. A co-founder of NYC, known for organizing community events in Milwaukee, Fojut focused on developing a platform that uses personality assessment to help shape individuals within an organization after delving into the psychological study of friendship and personality. It increases their meaningful relationship and participation in their company.

The algorithm is based on the HEXACO, a personality inventory that assesses a person’s trustworthiness, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. Fujut promises that the algorithm doesn’t often lead to issues related to groupthink or conformity because the algorithm “doesn’t define who you are as a whole, but rather highlights the parts of you that are most present in your worldview and your relationships with other people.” ”

Perhaps even more compelling is the fact that Like|Minded uses what Fojut refers to as “growth matches” to match the opposite of an algorithm with people to set up mentors within organizations.

An hour or so before the drop, Stephen Piron is watching the installation of variable-sized old televisions showing cameras recording various parts of the party. Piron is the founder of Desa – It was discovered by Square in 2016 and is famous for creating deep fakes, the most famous of which was a Joe Rogan clip that went viral in 2019. This party. But not before I told him how he and his colleagues at Desa had stumbled and fallen for the deep false reputation created by Ai.

“It was a coincidence,” he says. Bored of working on projects that help banks detect fraud, “some of us started doing something else,” he says.

Towards the end of the evening, as promised, the NFT auction will begin as the electric-blue NFT graphics change to abstract red, white and black animation. Bidding starts at $500.

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

One in five bids on an NFT reach $2,000. From the ground floor, I can still hear the auctioneer as I leave the building.