Technology and Creativity at Build 2021

Earlier today, I had the great pleasure to virtually address thousands of programmers and developers around the world via Microsoft’s annual Build conference. That global community of creative technologists was not just the audience for my keynote segment, but its inspiration, as well.  

I spend a ton of time tinkering around with the tools in my personal maker lab to pursue my own creative interests—in my case, using things like table saws and CNCs and oscilloscopes to make furniture, machines, and electronics, sometimes all three at once. I’ve increasingly been thinking about how our most powerful and advanced technological tools—things like supercomputing-scale AI and large language models, machine learning and the intelligent edge, and biotechnology—can support human ingenuity and creativity in profoundly powerful ways. 

In my talk, I was honored to collaborate with some exceptionally talented and creative folks who are using cutting-edge technology to realize their own work: 

• Ben Bloomberg is a creative technologist who imagines, designs and builds everything from electroacoustic musical instruments to AI-driven performances and tours. Ben and his creative partner Jacob Collier have an extraordinary broad curiosity and ambitious creative vision—in their hands, technology, even AI, is an instrument.
• Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit, joined us to show off a demo of what she created with the Adafruit + Lobe maker kit, an incredibly easy way to start coding your own machine learning projects. (I took a shot at building and coding my own Adafruit + Lobe project too, but don’t think I did quite as well as Limor ??). 
• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, talked about some of the amazing recent progress OpenAI has made with large language models and announced the new OpenAI Startup Fund—a 100 million dollar fund, managed by OpenAI with investment from Microsoft, that will invest in startups with big ideas about how to use AI to transform the world. 
• Finally, we discussed the groundbreaking work that Dr. David Baker and his team are doing at the UW Institute for Protein Design—using biotechnology to create entirely new biological compounds to battle the COVID-19 virus. (If you’re interested and want to hear more, I’ve just released the newest episode of my Behind the Tech podcast where Dr. Baker and I chat about his work.) 

All of this work amazes and inspires me. But the really extraordinary thing is that it’s just the tip of the iceberg—over the coming years, the rapid acceleration we’re seeing in the power and sophistication of our technology tools is going to empower us to solve currently unsolvable problems and realize wild ideas and solve enormous problems limited only by our imaginations. 

Take a few moments to watch, if you’re able—I’d love to hear any additional thoughts or bits of inspiration you all may have from your own experiences using technology as a tool to enable creativity.