Host

In the second half we will mainly answer the questions on Slido, and if anyone here has a question you are welcome to raise a hand and ask it directly. The first half was rather like finishing four chapters of a book. I hope it went in; and if it did not, today’s event—

As I was saying, we began with a great deal of our own knowledge, and with answers to your questions. For the second half, let us start from the two speakers themselves. First Audrey. What I am curious about: we have known each other since the Elixus days. The first time I met you, you had a camera with you, a battery slung here, and you walked about everywhere.

Right. What I am curious about is this. They have written it up here: from Elixus, to the open-source communities, to g0v , then the Ministry of Digital Affairs, and now Ambassador-at-Space. I am very curious which phase of yourself you like best. Or which phase of yourself you disagree with most.

Fantastic.

I love this kind of thing—“Which version of yourself do you like best?” “The present one, of course.” And everyone sitting here, at this moment, likes the two of you who are here now.

Oh—did I press one too many times?

Right, right, right. So, just now—

Right, small communities.

You know what? When the Dalai Lama’s entire corpus came up just now, my thought was that someone in Taiwan will build a—you know how there are prayer beads already, because of the, what is it, the Bluetooth prayer beads.

Right. Now the Bluetooth prayer beads could come with the Dalai Lama built in.

The next one is this. Right, we were on small questions, and now we make a great deal out of a small one. South Korea is promoting free AI for everyone . And they also make RAM, so this is fully vertically integrated—too good. Taiwan at the moment leans toward subsidizing disadvantaged groups. Is there a chance that we will follow South Korea’s example and promote a genuine “AI equity for all”?

All right, I am curious about this myself. We were talking about it earlier. I said, “My AI does a bit of work and then stops, and I still have to keep working, so now I don’t really want to go to sleep.” And Audrey told me, “Then you have to let it run in a loop, for eight hours or more.” Right. But I am curious how our two speakers use AI day to day.

Convincing it.

Thank you for that. Okay, this is interesting. Tomas asks a question: in an age of work built on large language models, the narrative capacity to think things together is very important. So what do you imagine for students of the humanities, law, and business who enter the technology industry? What is your view? And what caution, advice, or encouragement would you give them?

Tomas, anything more you would like to ask?

Follow up, then. The follow-up is the interesting part.

I have always felt that the finest engineers I know did not study computer science. The finest engineers I know all studied foreign languages.

There is another one here. You seemed to mention using software-engineering principles to control AI. Could you say a little more about what that means concretely?

I think we can ask this one bigger: how AI changes the workplace. This question was about software engineers. Let us take it wider and ask what everyone thinks about AI changing the workplace. And I would also like to ask further out.

Right. Let us ask just two years out.

Can’t be helped. By eleven o’clock, at least—

Then let’s go with 2028.

Thank you both.

That is exactly how it feels at my company now. But let me change the question, because Taiwanese people love a standard answer. And when everyone goes home today they will be asked, “So you went to Audrey Tang’s talk. What did you hear?”

What I am more curious about is this. Suppose—and I know you never really went to school—suppose the three of us could now go to any school and choose any department, and we had to go and study. What department would you choose, and why?

Everyone should go study philosophy.

All right, the mainstream view is philosophy. So now you know: one option is to go with the mainstream, and the other is to go against it. My advice is to stop studying immediately and teach yourself first, right?

Right, so when everyone gets home today, you can say, “Might philosophy be a good option?” And then, philosophy professors. We need to find philosophy professors. I am curious how you view Musk’s earlier prediction for 2036 : extreme deflation, more and more people not needing to work, that sort of thing.

The ability to read the room.

Mm, thank you for the answer. Here is another, and I think the answer is simply to download Ollama: with no background at all, wanting to learn to host AI like this yourself, what resources are there to learn from? Of course, I think we can just have everyone, after the session—

The “download Ollama” thing.

I like this question very much. It has been in the news, the controversy in literary circles. Because of a dispute over human–machine collaboration in the TSMC Literature Award , one winner was moved down the rankings. His account was that he had used AI only to fix typos and polish the writing, though nobody knows what really happened, and apparently someone even filed a report against him under their real name. All right: when AI has evolved to the point where the real and the false cannot be told apart, how should we regard the boundary of human ability? Can a human being who carries AI, and uses it well, claim these abilities as their own? And for people who cannot reach the higher-order AI abilities, how do we close that digital gap in future?

Thank you for that. And the story Tenzin Yangtso just told would be perfect to hand to Ted Chiang and let him write it as fiction.

Right, twins in a quarrel. Right. Do you want to ask this one yourself?

Go ahead, go ahead.

That implies fish could swim in the first place.

My own question has scrolled up, but I want to take the one below first. The person asking it is full of anxiety and confusion, I think, so it is a very long question, and it arrives with its own answer attached. But let me continue from Audrey’s answer just now: let us think about science, and think toward the bright side of technology. Suppose that a few years from now everyone has a Pokémon on their shoulder.

And that Pokémon is an on-device model.

Right. And at that point our model will be a private model, in the best case, ideally. So what do you think it will be, and what will it be able to achieve? And will it not be—will it be free of interference from the technology companies?

And then I scrolled to the bottom and saw someone say, “Will we really each have a Pokémon in the future? If so, I want a Psyduck.” So you see, the AI everyone wants is different. Wonderful.

I have a question here for both of you: at this moment in your lives, what is your life motto?

OK. The next one, for both of you. In your work or your daily life, collaborating with AI, has there been an experience that stayed with you, one that let you notice AI changing how you take part in things, how you feel about a result, or your relationships with the people around you? And after that experience, did you rearrange or adjust the ways and the boundaries of how you work with AI, and how you reach people through AI? That notion of a moment of awakening.

Because of the time, this is the last question today. And the person who asked it is here in the room. David, would you like to ask it yourself? Or shall I read it for you?

Come up, come up. You have come all this way.

Let me share a story first. In 2005 we were all on IRC. And one day at about half past two in the morning, I sent Audrey a message about something, I forget what. Audrey came back with the answer, whatever it was. I said, “You are awake right now?” And Audrey said, “No, I am asleep right now.”

Mm, all right. Any questions you particularly want to answer further? Otherwise we will finish here.

Thank you all very much.

Welcome, everyone, to our first Platform Originals event. We’re truly honored to have Audrey Tang and Tenzin Yangtso with us for this session. I was just talking with Audrey, and she’s flying back tomorrow.

Besides hosting events here, we’ve also started Platform Originals: I invite people I think are really worth a deep conversation, the kind you hear speak and still feel you haven’t heard enough from, so you want to ask more, like Audrey and her collaborators today. And then there is the “Station Stop” series. The basic idea is that AI is very new, and everything is accelerating. Compared with sitting in the audience while someone onstage tells you how to do a thing, if you’ve already been playing with a lot of this, you think: that looks like something I saw three months ago—and only then can it be prepared as a release. But more of it is probably still in progress. People may not know what is right and what is wrong; the question is how to exchange better. So this is work I very much hope we do together.

This first session, we’ve invited Audrey Tang and Tenzin Yangtso to share their new project, Reverse Alignment—the other side of alignment. I saw Audrey post about it on Facebook and thought, another one of these cheerful new things. I opened it and thought, this looks complicated. Right, so I went back to the source: I read their book, Plurality . Then I felt I had still more to read, and when I finished I thought, would you come and talk about it?