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Hi, I'm Refik. I'm a media artist.

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I use data as a pigment

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and paint with a thinking brush

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that is assisted
by artificial intelligence.

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Using architectural spaces as canvases,

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I collaborate with machines

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to make buildings dream and hallucinate.

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You may be wondering,
what does all this mean?

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So let me please take you
into my work and my world.

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I witnessed the power of imagination
when I was eight years old,

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as a child growing up in Istanbul.

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One day, my mom brought home
a videocassette

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of the science-fiction movie
"Blade Runner."

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I clearly remember being mesmerized

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by the stunning architectural vision
of the future of Los Angeles,

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a place that I had never seen before.

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That vision became
a kind of a staple of my daydreams.

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When I arrived in LA in 2012

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for a graduate program
in Design Media Arts,

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I rented a car and drove downtown

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to see that wonderful world
of the near future.

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I remember a specific line

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that kept playing
over and over in my head:

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the scene when the android Rachael

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realizes that her memories
are actually not hers,

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and when Deckard tells her
they are someone else's memories.

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Since that moment,

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one of my inspirations
has been this question.

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What can a machine do
with someone else's memories?

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Or, to say that in another way,

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what does it mean to be an AI
in the 21st century?

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Any android or AI machine

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is only intelligent
as long as we collaborate with it.

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It can construct things

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that human intelligence intends to produce

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but does not have the capacity to do so.

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Think about your activities
and social networks, for example.

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They get smarter
the more you interact with them.

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If machines can learn or process memories,

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can they also dream?

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Hallucinate?

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Involuntarily remember,

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or make connections
between multiple people's dreams?

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Does being an AI in the 21st century
simply mean not forgetting anything?

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And, if so,

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isn't it the most revolutionary thing
that we have experienced

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in our centuries-long effort
to capture history across media?

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In other words,

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how far have we come
since Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner"?

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So I established my studio in 2014

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and invited architects,

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computer and data scientists,
neuroscientists,

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musicians and even storytellers

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to join me in realizing my dreams.

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Can data become a pigment?

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This was the very first question we asked

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when starting our journey
to embed media arts into architecture,

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to collide virtual and physical worlds.

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So we began to imagine
what I would call the poetics of data.

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One of our first projects,
"Virtual Depictions,"

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was a public data sculpture piece

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commissioned by the city of San Francisco.

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The work invites the audience

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to be part of a spectacular
aesthetic experience

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in a living urban space

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by depicting a fluid network
of connections of the city itself.

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It also stands as a reminder

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of how invisible data
from our everyday lives,

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like the Twitter feeds
that are represented here,

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can be made visible

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and transformed into sensory knowledge
that can be experienced collectively.

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In fact, data can only become knowledge
when it's experienced,

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and what is knowledge and experience
can take many forms.

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When exploring such connections

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through the vast potential
of machine intelligence,

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we also pondered the connection
between human senses

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and the machines' capacity
for simulating nature.

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These inquiries began
while working on wind-data paintings.

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They took the shape of visualized poems

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based on hidden data sets
that we collected from wind sensors.

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We then used generative algorithms

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to transform wind speed,
gust and direction

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into an ethereal data pigment.

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The result was a meditative
yet speculative experience.

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This kinetic data sculpture,
titled "Bosphorus,"

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was a similar attempt to question
our capacity to reimagine

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natural occurrences.

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Using high-frequency radar collections
of the Marmara Sea,

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we collected sea-surface data

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and projected its dynamic movement
with machine intelligence.

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We create a sense of immersion

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in a calm yet constantly changing
synthetic sea view.

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Seeing with the brain
is often called imagination,

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and, for me, imagining architecture

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goes beyond just glass, metal or concrete,

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instead experimenting with
the furthermost possibilities of immersion

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and ways of augmenting
our perception in built environments.

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Research in artificial intelligence
is growing every day,

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leaving us with the feeling
of being plugged into a system

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that is bigger and more knowledgeable

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than ourselves.

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In 2017, we discovered
an open-source library

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of cultural documents in Istanbul

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and began working on "Archive Dreaming,"

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one of the first AI-driven
public installations in the world,

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an AI exploring approximately
1.7 million documents that span 270 years.

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One of our inspirations
during this process

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was a short story
called "The Library of Babel"

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by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

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In the story, the author conceives
a universe in the form of a vast library

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containing all possible 410-page books
of a certain format and character set.

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Through this inspiring image,

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we imagine a way to physically explore
the vast archives of knowledge

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in the age of machine intelligence.

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The resulting work, as you can see,

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was a user-driven immersive space.

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"Archive Dreaming" profoundly transformed
the experience of a library

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in the age of machine intelligence.

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"Machine Hallucination"
is an exploration of time and space

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experienced through New York City's
public photographic archives.

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For this one-of-a-kind immersive project,

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we deployed machine-learning algorithms

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to find and process over
100 million photographs of the city.

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We designed an innovative narrative system

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to use artificial intelligence
to predict or to hallucinate new images,

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allowing the viewer
to step into a dreamlike fusion

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of past and future New York.

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As our projects delve deeper

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into remembering
and transmitting knowledge,

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we thought more about how memories
were not static recollections

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but ever-changing
interpretations of past events.

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We pondered how machines

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could simulate unconscious
and subconscious events,

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such as dreaming,
remembering and hallucinating.

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Thus, we created "Melting Memories"

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to visualize the moment of remembering.

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The inspiration came from a tragic event,

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when I found out that my uncle
was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

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At that time, all I could think about

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was to find a way to celebrate
how and what we remember

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when we are still able to do so.

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I began to think of memories
not as disappearing

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but as melting or changing shape.

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With the help of machine intelligence,

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we worked with the scientists
at the Neuroscape Laboratory

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at the University of California,

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who showed us how to understand
brain signals as memories are made.

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Although my own uncle was losing
the ability to process memories,

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the artwork generated by EEG data

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explored the materiality of remembering

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and stood as a tribute
to what my uncle had lost.

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Almost nothing about contemporary LA

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matched my childhood
expectation of the city,

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with the exception
of one amazing building:

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the Walt Disney Concert Hall,
designed by Frank Gehry,

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one of my all-time heroes.

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In 2018, I had a call
from the LA Philharmonic

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who was looking for an installation

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to help mark the celebrated symphony's
hundred-year anniversary.

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For this, we decided to ask the question,

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"Can a building learn? Can it dream?"

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To answer this question,

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we decided to collect everything recorded
in the archives of the LA Phil and WDCH.

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To be precise, 77 terabytes
of digitally archived memories.

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By using machine intelligence,

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the entire archive, going back 100 years,

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became projections on the building's skin,

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42 projectors to achieve
this futuristic public experience

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in the heart of Los Angeles,

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getting one step closer
to the LA of "Blade Runner."

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If ever a building could dream,

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it was in this moment.

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Now, I am inviting you to one last journey
into the mind of a machine.

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Right now, we are fully immersed
in the data universe

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of every single curated TED Talk
from the past 30 years.

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That means this data set includes
7,705 talks from the TED stage.

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Those talks have been translated
into 7.4 million seconds,

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and each second is represented
here in this data universe.

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Every image that you are seeing in here

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represents unique moments
from those talks.

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By using machine intelligence,

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we processed a total of 487,000 sentences

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into 330 unique clusters of topics
like nature, global emissions,

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extinction, race issues, computation,

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trust, emotions, water and refugees.

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These clusters are then
connected to each other

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by an algorithm,

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[that] generated 113 million
line segments,

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which reveal new conceptual relationships.

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Wouldn't it be amazing
to be able to remember

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all the questions that have ever
been asked on the stage?

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Here I am,

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inside the mind
of countless great thinkers,

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as well as a machine,
interacting with various feelings

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attributed to learning,

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remembering, questioning

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and imagining all at the same time,

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expanding the power of the mind.

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For me, being right here

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is indeed what it means
to be an AI in the 21st century.

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It is in our hands, humans,

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to train this mind to learn and remember

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what we can only dream of.

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Thank you.