Kevin Huang | My First Talk in Taiwan, on What AIGC Was About to Do (Taipei)

On 26 April 2023 I gave my first public talk in Taiwan, to a room of EMBA students, professors and working professionals in Taipei. The subject was AI-generated content — what it was, where it was heading, and what it would mean for the people in the room.

The timing is worth stating plainly, because it explains the atmosphere. ChatGPT had been public for five months. Most of the audience had used it, none of them had a settled opinion about it, and nobody yet knew which of the confident predictions circulating that spring would look sensible a year later. I was not speaking to people who wanted a tool demonstration. I was speaking to executives trying to work out whether this was a productivity feature or a structural change to their industries.

What I remember most is that the questions were better than my answers. An EMBA audience is not a technical one, but it is a room full of people who have made expensive decisions under uncertainty before, and they went straight at the parts I was least sure of: what happens to the work of people whose job is producing a first draft, how you tell a real capability gain from a demo, what any of it does to the value of expertise. We ended up somewhere more interesting than my slides — a conversation about culture and human judgement rather than about models.

I build and run Metablox.co, a location-anchored memory platform, so I spend most of my time on infrastructure rather than on stages. Standing in front of that particular audience, at that particular moment, is still the sharpest professional memory I have from 2023. It was the first time I had to defend a view about where technology was going to people qualified to disagree with me.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), Metablox.co