The 2025 edition of FPL’s Northwest Florida Economic Symposium revolved around FOCUS.
“The theme,” explained J.T. Young, FPL vice president and general manager for the utility’s Northwest Region, “reflects our collective commitment to sharpening our vision, honing our strategies and driving impactful progress for our communities and industries.”
The symposium attracts business leaders, government officials, academics and members of the region’s economic development community, providing all with an exceptional networking opportunity and insights they can employ in their professional and civic lives.
For the ninth time, TechFarms Capital was a sponsor of the event, dating to years when it was sponsored by the Gulf Power Co.
“The symposium is a great source of information about current and emerging trends, a good branding opportunity for us and a chance to interact with people who we see as potential investors,” said Steve Millaway, the founder of companies including TechFarms Capital, where he is a general partner.
Symposium speakers addressed topics ranging from the global economy to private/public partnerships and the U.S. Space Force.
Of particular interest to Millaway was a presentation, “FOCUS on Innovating the Future with AI,” delivered by Hod Lipson, a professor of engineering and data science at Columbia University in New York City.
At Columbia, Lipson is chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department. He conducts research related to artificial intelligence and robotics and steers students through projects wherein they design and build robots capable of self-replication, reflection, asking questions and even being creative.
He stresses in appearances around the country that AI can tackle challenges that are too complicated for humans to address.
About climate change, he says, “It involves so many ripple effects that we cannot figure out what the right thing is to do and when to do it. But it is data rich and ripe for AI.”
He is confident that AI will identify ways to build better batteries that will break through current limitations affecting drones and physical robotics.
“The mantra in my lab is ‘Whatever you want to do, don’t do it; train AI to do it,’” Lipson says.
Lipson has described the growth of AI as “spine-chilling.”
He notes that during the “third wave” in AI’s evolution, machines learned to distinguish between a dog and a cat, driverless cars became a reality, and researchers uncovered AI’s potential use in developing phone applications to “detect skin cancer better than a team of specialists at Stanford.”
In a fourth and even more disruptive wave, AI can be expected to learn to carry on conversations.
Millaway was impressed by the fabulous growth in computing power as illustrated by Lipson. (Photo, above.)
Throughout the 20th century, the number of gigaflops (GFLOPS) produced by a dollar’s worth of computer hardware remained flat at zero. A GFLOPS is a unit of measurement that relates to a computer’s capacity for performing floating-point operations. One GFLOPS is equal to one billion floating-point operations per second.
In the years since 2015, GFLOPS/$ has grown to more than 200 and is expected to double every 2.2 years, going forward.
Harnessed for productive uses, the awesome combined power of computers and AI will accomplish feats that today seem far off or impossible, Lipson predicted.
Millaway was astonished and maybe a little dubious when Lipson, in unqualified fashion, said that “if we can all hang in there for another five years, we won’t have to worry about cancer. AI will have found cures.”
Indeed, today’s unprecedented and accelerating pace of change is so terrific that it be hard to FOCUS on.
