The North American Taiwanese Engineers Association (NATEA) held the “North American Taiwanese Startup Day – NextGen AI” forum at Stanford University on June 29 (last Saturday). The forum invited experts to delve into the future opportunities, challenges, and trends in the artificial intelligence industry, providing attendees with the latest information.
On that day, the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center at Stanford University was packed with 200 AI industry entrepreneurs, investors, industry experts, and academic professionals.
It is reported that NATEA received over 400 online reservations but due to venue constraints, only 200 people were able to attend the event in person.
Yao-Hung Yang, President of NATEA, mentioned that experts from Atlanta, Southern California, and Taiwan gathered to communicate and discuss face-to-face, fostering more collaboration and innovative breakthroughs. He highlighted Taiwan’s early application of artificial intelligence in areas such as subways and reservoir flood prevention decades ago.
In recent years, with the advancement of chip technology, computing power has seen significant growth, rapidly enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of computer algorithms, facilitating optimal computing operations.
He also emphasized Taiwan’s outstanding hardware technology and the US’s global leadership in software technology; looking forward, Taiwan can assist the US in making computers faster, better, updated, and more accurate in the development of AI.
In Silicon Valley’s Taiwanese-American technology community, efforts are underway to bridge Taiwan and the United States in industries, academia, investments, among other fields, paving the way for Taiwan’s future AI development.
Dr. Hsiang-He Lee, President of NATEA, stated that this year’s US-Taiwan Startup Day was the association’s first physical event held in the Bay Area. Through this event, they aim to promote industrial exchanges between Taiwan and the US, especially in the technology and startup sectors.
While the association initially focused on hardware areas such as semiconductors, it is gradually shifting towards software and the trending Generative AI. The goal is to expose attendees to more knowledge, particularly in Generative AI, to drive innovation in startups.
The event ran from 1:30 pm to 6:00 pm, starting with a keynote speech by Jessica Shieh, an expert architect of OpenAI, on “Harnessing the Power of Generative Artificial Intelligence.”
Following that, Jay Chen, CEO of Avalanche Computing Taiwan, and KJ Yang, CEO of Kura Care, shared first-hand practical experiences and observations on the future of AI startups. The event also featured partners from Silicon Valley VC firms and corporate venture managers sharing standout experiences in the competitive VC and startup landscape.
At the end of the forum, attendees engaged in discussions and networking with investors and industry leaders over refreshments. The forum also organized a raffle for round-trip tickets from San Francisco to Taipei.