Ars in San Jose recap: Infrastructure, sustainability, AI, cocktails

Enlarge / Dr. John Timmer, Jeff Ball, Joanna Wong, and Lee Hutchinson discussing infrastructure and the environment. (credit: Kimberly White/Getty Images)

Last week, Ars Technica Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher and I made the westerly trek to sunny San Jose to kick off an event titled “Beyond the Buzz: An Infrastructure Future with GenAI and What Comes Next,” hosted in partnership with IBM. It was awesome to get to stand up on stage and talk to a room packed full of interested Ars readers, and for everyone who was able to come, thank you for being there! (For everyone who wasn’t able to come, that’s okay—we’re doing another event next month in DC. I’ll have more info about that at the end of this piece.)

The San Jose event was hosted at the Computer History Museum, which, as venues go, was absolutely on-brand and appropriate—and Ars would like to extend its thanks to the folks at CHM for being so kind and accommodating to our gathering of geeks.

“Our lineup of speakers and topics today reflects the complexity and rapid evolution of the tech landscape we all operate in,” noted Fisher in his opening remarks on the program. “We will be discussing not only the promise of generative AI, but also the challenges it brings in terms of infrastructure demands, security vulnerabilities, and environmental impacts.”