During LA Tech Week 2024, held October 13-19, 2025, USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute brought together leading voices in artificial intelligence to explore both the breathtaking opportunities and sobering challenges posed by the technology’s rapid advancement. The discussion was moderated by Yolanda Gil, Senior Director of AI and Data Science Initiatives for the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. 

The panel, featuring researchers, government officials, and industry veterans, revealed a field moving so fast that even its pioneers struggle to predict what comes next. “I’d say it’s exciting. I don’t know that that’s necessarily positive,” said Jonathan May, a principal scientist at ISI and research associate professor in computer science, when asked about recent AI developments. His ambivalence captured a recurring theme throughout the discussion: artificial intelligence is transforming society at unprecedented speed, but the implications remain uncertain.

May pointed to OpenAI’s Sora video generation tool as emblematic of this tension. “This has definitely been the buzziest thing lately,” he said. “I would say it’s a little potentially scary to me and maybe not, I would say the direction that I would think we should be going.”

The Pace of Change

Karl Jacob, a strategic advisor to ISI and serial entrepreneur, compared the current AI revolution to the early internet boom. “I was around for the Internet boom and there was a point in time where just things were happening literally every day,” he said. “And it’s kind of the same thing… The landscape is moving really and so it’s a different adaptation.”

Trelynd Bradley, deputy director of innovation and emerging technologies at the California Governor’s Office of Business and Development, went further, describing AI as part of a constellation of revolutionary technologies. “We have a subset of sectors in the economy, including AI, which have the highest compound annual growth rates of any industries or sectors that we’ve seen in American economic history,” he said.

Bradley noted that California hosts 35 of the top 50 AI companies in the world, with the Bay Area alone accounting for this concentration. The state recently reached a milestone with 68% of all U.S. venture capital raised in the first half of this year flowing to California companies, with AI as a massive driver.

A Technology Escaping Definition

Adam Russell, who directs ISI’s AI division and previously served as Chief Vision Officer at the U.S. AI Safety Institute at NIST, described himself as “an apocaloptimist”. I’m totally excited about what the future is. Unless it all goes wrong.”

Russell’s primary concern isn’t the technology itself, but how society will adapt. “We are building technology we don’t understand and putting it into a world filled with creatures we don’t understand,” he said. “We don’t understand ourselves.”

The panel grappled with fundamental questions about what AI actually is. “Int

elligence is not binary,” Russell argued. “It is not a yes or no. It’s actually a spectrum… These things are showing indications of being able to do things urgently in some cases.”

May offered a more cautious view, warning against anthropomorphizing AI systems. “At the end of the day it’s a big matrix,” he said. “You don’t call a hammer a superhuman nail pusher.”

Real-World Applications

Despite their concerns, panelists acknowledged AI’s transformative potential across numerous fields. May, who teaches natural language processing, highlighted a practical benefit he’s observed firsthand: “My students’ paper quality has actually gone up quite a bit. A lot of them don’t have English as their first language, so they’re really at a deficit. They have great ideas, but the ideas weren’t always coming through well. They come through a lot better now.”

Bradley described AI’s potential in drug discovery, urban planning, and infrastructure. “With AI and quantum together and drug discovery, you can unlock pharmaceutical solutions that can save potentially millions of lives,” he said.

Jacob found value in AI as a brainstorming partner. “It’s a fantastic brainstorm… the best screen scraper ever,” he said. “It literally knows pretty much everything about the Internet.”

Russell shared a particularly moving example of AI’s impact on his family. His young daughter, struggling to express her emotions, used an AI tool to help create visual representations of her feelings. “She would begin to describe keywords of how she felt and we would work with an LLM at that point to build a picture for her,” he explained. “Do not tell me that’s not magic.”

The Regulation Dilemma

The discussion of AI governance revealed deep complexities. Russell criticized the polarized nature of the debate. “The belief that AI safety is somehow dependent on you having to believe that AI will kill us all. These unfortunate discourses have taken place because it’s really prevented us from talking, I think, more intelligently across these lines.”

He advocated for making AI safety “a science rather than faith,” with concrete measurements rather than speculation. “There’s a great graph that came out recently from the Fed in Dallas showing some potential futures, and it was only some linear growth of GDP or it takes off and we’re in Utopia or it plummets and we’re all extinct,” he said. “That’s literally like a government chart.”

California is at the forefront of state-level AI regulation. Bradley noted that recent legislation focuses on specific sectors like healthcare, education, and cybersecurity. “On a case by case basis… the discourse on regulating it in certain spaces is happening,” he said.

Jacob drew parallels to past technological anxieties. “I remember actually, when Netscape, the browser for the Internet, was declared as a weapon of mass destruction by the government,” he recalled, referring to encryption controls. His message: “We have to inspire and allow growth and mistakes big ones early on so that they learn.”

The Human Element

Perhaps the most persistent theme was the interplay between human and artificial intelligence. Russell emphasized humanity’s greatest strength: “Our superpower is not our individual intelligence, it’s all of us together, social learning.”

May warned against over-reliance on AI, noting his own selective use. “I’m something of a Luddite,” he admitted, adding that he prefers human expertise when possible. “I like to try to be human first.”

The panel also confronted uncomfortable questions about AI’s impact on employment and inequality. May noted that AI represents “yet another rich get richer technology that’s going to benefit the people it’s designed for and by.”

Bradley argued that workforce training programs need radical redesign for the AI era. “We need more apprenticeship programs in a world of emerging technologies where folks can go down a training pathway and go and branch out to multiple different technologies or sectors,” he said.

Southern California’s AI Future

The panelists expressed optimism about Southern California’s unique position in the AI landscape. May highlighted ISI’s interdisciplinary culture, noting that collaborative work across divisions is commonplace. “There’s never really been hard lines between different divisions,” he said.

Bradley emphasized the region’s diverse industrial base, from aerospace to entertainment to the Port of Los Angeles, which moves 40% of containers for the entire United States. This variety, he argued, positions Southern California well for AI’s next phase: “The proliferation through a lot of other sectors.”

Jacob pointed to a practical advantage: space. “LA has access to physical space that San Francisco just does not,” he said, noting that robotics and hardware companies need room to build.

As the discussion concluded, Russell offered a sobering reminder of what’s at stake. “The other thing humans have done traditionally when in times of deep change and complexity is they’ve come to act as if their lives depend on each other,” he said. “And I think we need to do that again. Because they do.”

Published on November 18th, 2025

Last updated on November 19th, 2025