Hyderabad, December 10, 2020: The session on ‘The Future of Entertainment’ on day 3 of the TiE Global Summit, moderated by Consultant & Author Dr. Madanmohan Rao had Film Producer Shobu Yarlagadda, Co-Founder and CEO, Arka Media Works and Director / Screenwriter Anjali Menon revealing the entertainment industry future.
In his opening comments, Dr. Rao said that during the pandemic the corporates have referred to WFH as ‘Work From Home’ but the people in the entertainment industry have referred to WFH as ‘Watch From Home’.
Speaking about the future of entertainment, Mr. Shobu Yarlagadda shared that the industry has reached the pre-COVID level of work in cinema production. There is a demand for good writers, technicians and directors, opined Shobu. He said that COVID has been a learning curve for the industry on two fronts. On the creative front, the pandemic and its restrictions have called for scripts that demand less, and on the production front, the implementation of COVID Safe workplace regulations has insisted on downscaling the number of people (almost 150 who are generally people at any time on the set normally) present on the movie set.
The OTT (Over-The-Top media service) platforms have greatly established a good demand for small-medium production films. Speaking about small-medium production movies, Anjali Menon has informed that the rise in small-medium production films has broken the investment barrier in the entertainment industry in the COVID era. People who have never produced movies are now coming forward, she said.
Speaking about the intersection of technology and content creation, Shobu Yarlagadda has shed some light on the rise of start-ups who are using AI to identify and nurture talent in suggesting successful scripts have been path-breaking. Both Anjali Menon and Shobu Yarlagadda agreed that ‘feel-good content’ is what people are longing for.
Anjali Menon has said that consumption of content is being more desired in an individualized space (mobile phones) for the millennials. Speaking about content, she said that there is a lot of crime and violence. People are looking for ‘feel-good’ content. Throwing light on the viewing habits, Anjali rued that the older generation is not comfortable with OTT platforms just because of the sheer numbers of buttons we need to press to access the content. The mid-aged and older generation is comfortable with TV while the young generation is onto OTTs, said Shobu.
Anjali and Shobu agreed that the convergence of tech and creativity is bringing on a lot of possibilities. Shobu talked about how the marriage of technology and storytelling can bring about a change in storytelling. Using real-time tech, game engines, etc. for movie production is fascinating, said Shobu.
The State of AI and its impact on the Startup Ecosystem
Chinese American scientist Dr. Andrew NG addressed a session on ‘The State of AI and its impact on the startup ecosystem’. Andrew said that today we are in the middle of an AI revolution. What we are seeing is just the beginning, there is a lot more to come. AI is going to impact all major industries with application in prediction, decision making, human augmentation, etc. The new businesses that will come out of AI are still underway. The impact of AI is predicted to be greater than what the internet did, he said.
We have been talking about AI for a long time. The fundamental drivers of AI technology viz. computing, networking, storage, digitization, new algorithms are strong. We will all continue to digitize our world. There is huge digital data growth. There is a rise in visual data. The research papers publishing on Machine Learning and AI have not slowed down, he said.
Giving a glimpse of the coming AI technology revolutions, Andrew shared about AI-enabled GAN video compression, Pre-trained transformer language models like GPT-3, GPT-7, Bert-5, workboats like New Algo-2, etc. He even showed a live demo of GPT-3. Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. It is still in a work in progress.
He addressed the audience on emerging opportunities in AI such as Verticalized AI platforms, NextGen enterprises with AI-enabled back offices, sales, etc. He said that yesterday’s internet created today's FAANG (FAANG is an acronym used by investors to describe five individual high-growth tech stocks: Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon). Today’s AI startups will be tomorrow’s FAANG, Andrew said.
Answering a question, Andrew also addressed the misgivings about AI and ethical issues. Job displacement will be there but we can’t throw people on the streets, he said. We have to take care of people. AI does not displace many jobs, he said. AI society has the responsibility and obligation to address the problems created, he said.
What I am worried about is whether AI will lead to concentration of power, he said. AI community can have a convergence of shared values like in the doctor's community there is the Hippocratic Oath. The oath in the medical field guides the doctors caring for the patient and gives clear norms as to what is important, he opined.
He gave a brief description of his AI fund and partnering with AI companies to ensure they have a solid business and AI strategies and build strong teams. In reply to a question on support for Indian entrepreneurs, Andrew said that though he is currently supporting entrepreneurs in the US. He welcomed Indian entrepreneurs to reach out to present ideas and there is no stopping for funds for exciting ideas
We owe our children a better planet
We owe our children a better planet, said Daaji Kamlesh Patel is the Founder of Heartfulness meditation practise, and the third president of Shri Ram Chandra Mission while delivering a key note address.
Speaking about spirituality and entrepreneurship, Daaji recalled the era of supersonic flight and said that one appreciates the speed of a supersonic flight but opined that the same speed in unregulated thought is disastrous for oneself. He expressed that a state of relaxation is critical for entrepreneurs to infer, reflect and respond to the challenges they encounter as entrepreneurs. He added that entrepreneurs are like mothers and fathers, they nurture their enterprise with care and passion. But in a state of the unregulated speed of thoughts, entrepreneurs cannot appreciate ideas which would otherwise make them change makers he said.
He called on entrepreneurs to establish the practice of meditation in their daily routine to appreciate creativity. Daaji affirmed that it is possible to be successful in a material world as well as in the spiritual world. "You are the experiment, you are the experimenter, and you are the outcome," he told his virtual attendees.
DeepTech is just a trailer
AI will contribute 15.7 trillion dollars to the world economy by 2030 according to PwC report the panel comprised of Sanjay Mehta, Thomas Gustinis, and Madhurima Agarwal said. Entrepreneur-turned-angel investor Sanjay Mehta claims that the world is marching towards a new way of life by 2025 given the magnitude of data and information the world is currently generating.
Offensive AI – the misuse of AI will command solutions (like cybersecurity for cyberspace) in the future to prevent and curb AI from offensive attacks in the future Mr. Sanjay added.
The inability to differentiate between what is real and what is fake would become bleaker with the rise of AI said Mr. Sanjay, citing the example of the AI Chabot.
Innovation Evangelist Madhurima Agarwal informed the audience that it is important to identify the good data from the bad data, the difference between which would be a case of ‘dump in, dump out’.
Google for Start-ups
94% of all workloads are estimated to be run on some form of cloud environment by 2021 as per CISCO estimates.
Most of the start-ups are data driven and infrastructure agnostic. Digital is the core to start-up business model and hence the case wise tailored support by google is a key contribution to the start-ups in the cloud space opined Karan Bajwa, Google India, MD.
Speaking about key attributes in choosing a cloud platform for start-ups, Mr Karan mentioned that simplicity in app development, access to scalable and manageable customer databases, and an ability to protect and enable access to their online assets via a reliable and securely designed global infrastructure are critical he noted.
Unprecedented times but unprecedented opportunities. Google has used the strategy to ‘serve, not sell’ to democratise the use of technologies added Karan Bajwa citing the example of Google Meet being re-engineered and offered for free during the pandemic.
Sharing his experience of cloud usage, Sharad Kumar Agarwal (Head IT, JK Tyres) noted that cloud is the subconscious part of our daily life.
The panel in the session agreed that in a time when technology adoption is massively increasing, organisations either digitalise or they die.
Mr Karan advised the entrepreneur audience not to look at tomorrow with the lens of yesterday.
Diet for the mind
The COVID pandemic has brought with itself an avalanche called the mental health pandemic. With crippling businesses and extensive job cuts, a sense of uncertainty is naturally prevalent in all quarters of society. But it can be otherwise when we create and take charge of an internal order during this external disorder stated SA Sreedharan, a new-age philosopher and self-management expert.
Talking to the entrepreneurial audience, Mr. Sreedharan expressed a strong need for mental health fitness in COVID and post COVID times. Speaking about the faculties of mind and the intellect, the speaker noted that indiscriminate flow of thoughts in mind and a discriminate flow of thoughts to be intellect. And thereby suggesting a diet for the mind, a way to use intellect to regulate the mind.
Mr. Sreedharan stated that hell or heaven are not geographical locations, rather they are the states of the mind. He also outlined a simple yet comprehensive mental diet plan for everyone:
Express gratitude but do not expect gratitude.
Receive gracefully, give joyfully.
Be slow to judge and quick to forgive.
Be dependable, not dependent.
What you expect from others, first expect it from yourself.
Be expressive of your love and demonstrative of your happiness.
Trust, even if you lose trust in trust.
Bring selflessness to your life.
Have faith in divinity – connect with something beyond the purview of thought.
Be a multi-role wonder by bringing a balance into life.
The self-management expert concluded his address to the entrepreneurs by stating that “It’s difficult to find happiness in oneself but difficult to find it anywhere else.”
