Deep Dream

Jessica Brillhart describes leaving Google to start Vrai Pictures, where she could pursue creative work across VR, AR, and machine learning. She argues that immersive stories should give people room to explore while still conveying a clear underlying truth, and explains how a creator can design for that through world-building, flow, and the audience’s agency. She discusses projects including Deep Dream and The Weather Channel, and reflects on how VR might support art, education, social connection, and memory. She also emphasizes that immersive audio and thoughtful uses beyond entertainment are important to the medium’s future.

Tim Hwang describes how his Google public policy role connects AI research with governments, regulators, and social impacts. The talk explores fairness and privacy, adversarial vulnerabilities, automation, and the challenge of making machine learning understandable and useful in products. Hwang discusses opportunities in creative tools, small niche applications, cloud machine learning, and on-device learning, while emphasizing that good interfaces and domain knowledge matter alongside research. He closes with recommendations for learning about machine learning and its history, including past cycles of AI hype.