This week’s Crossroads Summit promised not to be just another conference – and it delivered.
With the theme “Chaos in the morning. Innovation in the afternoon,” the one-day summit was kept purposely small – 300 people filling the Biltmore Holtel’s ballroom on Wednesday – and the discussions on stage were deep. No lightning talks here; every hourlong discussion featured visionary leaders from the worlds of tech and finance about the AI future. This second annual conference was produced by Gianni D’Alerto and Ralph Quintero of Purple Horizons, in collaboration with Saif Ishoof from Lab22c and Karl Sprague from Sprague Associates; TradeStation was the title sponsor.
Brian Beaulieu, ITR Economics Consulting’s chief economist, kicked off the conference with a sobering forecast: The US will experience a very deep recession – dare we say it, a depression – in the early 2030s. He’s had a strong track record of being right in his predictions, so we’d better prepare for the possibility. Based on factors such as demographic shifts, healthcare costs, entitlements, inflation and national debt, he predicts the depression will last until 2036. The good news, he said, is that he expects the US to come out of it strong (after half of us Boomers have perished), thanks to millennials playing a crucial role in driving that future growth.
Still, the US will face significant economic challenges, with manufacturing sectors particularly vulnerable. In his view, investing in resilient sectors like technology, healthcare and agriculture will be key. So what to do in the meantime? Stress test your business now, he says. Focus on debt reduction and strategic investments. To find those, “stop listening to the noise. Focus on what the consumer is doing,” he said, noting that its why pet products are recession proof. “If you do that, life becomes so much simper.”
Just how AI will disrupt our future was a key theme explored and debated throughout the discussions. Dr. Michael J. Jabbour, AI Innovation Officer of Microsoft [pictured below], emphasized the importance of the human touch in AI-driven processes, particularly in the medical field. While sharing examples of the amazing accuracy of AI diagnoses, he said the need for empathy in delivering painful diagnoses and throughout a healthcare journey should not be understated. While he forsees much transformation in education systems, particularly in universities, he hopes that children won’t lose their sense of wonder and curiosity.
An on-stage conversation among Eric Galen (Galen & Partners), Jeff Ransdell (Fuel Venture Capital), William Quigley (Magnetic), and Alpen Sheth (Borderless Capital) highlighted the transformative powers of stablecoins and blockchain, with Tether expected to dominate currency tokenization. “The longterm legacy of crypto will not be Bitcoin, it will be Tether and stablecoins,” Quigley said. “Tokenization of currency will eliminate the need to convert currencies… And I think longer term we will see stable coins everywhere.”
The job displacement by AI is a “storm that is coming for white-collar workers like we have never ever seen before,” Ransdell said. Still, he said the human condition tends to adapt, and for the CEOs in the room, the focus should be on making sure your businesses “are adapting to all the technologies you possibly can.” The S&P 500 will look very different in five years, Ransdell predicted.
Rony Abovitz, founder and CEO of South Florida startup SynthBee, has a far different view when it comes to large AGI models that he called “computational autocracy,” a dictatorial system.“Everything about AGI lends itself to a small group of people concentrating power and economics into giant, centrally controlled systems with the illusion that you benefit from it,” he says, while you give them everything – your data, your skills, your jobs, your intellectual property.
As for signs of trouble in AI paradise, Abovitiz pointed to results of a recent MIT study showing that 95% of AI installations at enterprise companies were failing. Add to that the denouncements by three godfathers of AI: Yann LeCun formerly of Meta, Geoff Hinton formerly of Google, and Yoshia Bengio.
The better model in his view: computational democracy, which promotes distributed modular computing and individual control. It’s what SynthBee is building: a decentralized, trustworthy approach to AI, one with transparency, testability and human-centric design, said Abovitz, who previously founded Magic Leap and before that co-founded Mako Surgical. “There is a way forward that you can blend people and non-human intelligence in a very compatible way. It’s meant to support us, but us in the center.”
SynthBee’s pursuit toward Collaborative Intelligence, or CI, is inspired by Abovitz’s time at Mako, where he and his team built a human-compatible, interactive robot with “collaborative robot intelligence,” he shared. “[Mako’s robot] has now has done millions of cases at thousands of sites around the world, with super human accuracy – incredibly good clinical results, no hallucinations.”
Just before the summit’s closing party, Asher Genoot, executive chairman of American Bitcoin and chairman and CEO of Hut8, took the stage. “Asher went the entire life cycle of going from being a venture backed founder to listing on the NASDAQ, and today is the youngest CEO of a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ. He wound up spooling up another company called American Bitcoin, which is now also a publicly traded company. You will rarely ever meet anyone who is all of 30 who has been able to accomplish that – and right here in Miami,” said Saif Ishoof, founder of Lab22c, who moderated the conversation.
Genoot [pictured below], who moved to Miami five years ago, shared his vision for both American Bitcoin and Hut8, which are merging energy, digital infrastructure and Bitcoin mining, and he emphasized the importance of finding low-cost sources of energy to drive technological advancements, such as AI and robotics. “In the US right now, we don’t have enough power, and that’s a real problem,” Genoot said. Being part of the solution by helping drive continued development of generation assets will “help fuel these technologies so the bottleneck isn’t electricity and we can let entrepreneurs go build great businesses – and make everyday life that much better.”
The Crossroads Summit will return to Coral Gables for its third year next November, and again will be capped at about 300 attendees, said D’Alerta of Purple Horizons. “That intimacy is what creates those fly-on-the-wall moments, the feeling that you’re sitting in the room while big ideas are being shaped. It’s almost like catching Einstein or another great mind thinking out loud before the rest of the world hears it.”
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