Tricia Wang: Pi, Einstein, and the Choice We Face with AI | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

All right, everyone has gotten their coffee and we I think I don't remember what all the floors are, but I think the main message was walk or rap, go to the different floors and treat this as a treasure hunt. So, my name is Sa Wong and I'm the co-founder and CEO of the Advanced AI Society and we're creating the market infrastructure for many of the technologies you're going to be hearing about today. But my main purpose for us today is to be your host, be the benevolent indicator of the might. And so as a person controlling mic, my main uh my you should look to me as helping you validate the various clores and ste what you know I you just heard earlier who just came to the room. We had the co-founder of the building, Jacob Jetto, who is your under your fellow add.

And Jacob's had a really good analogy for what this grand experiment is happening at a Frenchier tower, which is that we're not here just to build a community. We're here to build a society. I mean, he talks about the three important, you know, necessary factors to bring this society together, which governance, you need economics, and you need currency. You're going to find that off all the floors. Now I've been reflecting on you know one of the important things that have made society UBR is all of our innovations and many of the innovation that we have today we could thank to the discovery of pi which is really the mother of all commons and I do not think it should be lost upon us that over centuries centuries I think humans have figured out how to hold this narrative together of keeping the commons of keeping The Pia commas.

No one owns it. No one oversees it. And it has been discovered independently by many societies that have had a strong mathematical tradition. Babylonians to the Egyptians to the Chinese to the Greek. So they all were able to do innovations such as like building the architectures of their time from fluid dynamics to engineering to calculating you know now mathematical distance not just on earth but to space all thanks to this very special formula that simply helps us figure out how to predict distances using circumference using circle um and it allows society to move from really being literally I lit mean literally a society of squares to a society of circles and it really diversified society to have this commons be a technology that was available for everyone.

And so we really need to think about well how do we figure out the commons of our times and it just so happens that today is also the birthday of anyone come on we're a room of nerds you have to know this pie and Einstein It is Einstein's birthday. We have to wake up. We need more coffee, please. There's coffee right behind you. But don't get up this second.

You can do it in a break. So Einstein, I think it's also a really interesting contrast. On one end, we have pi, which is, you know, the mother of all commons, right? The great grandmother of all comments. And then we have E= MC square, where Einstein discovers a powerful algorithm that unleashes the greatest source of energy in history.

and that he figures it out and then it moves out of his control. One government decides to move faster than all other government to weaponize it before any governance exists before even any economy around it exists. an entire government able to you know literally constrain and build a moat around this technology and then Einsteight we all go to wars that we don't have for account of what happens with that surplus of energy is not redistributed literally it is kept within one country and their allies resources and so Einstein spent his life trying to figure out well how do we redistribute this surplus how do we make sure that all of the innovations that come from this formula is not just held in one hands that we create the governance we create the economy to make sure that we can all keep it into the commons and figure out how we want to use the technology and so now today it is you know we have pi on one and that's the mother of all comments and then we see you know Einstein with his energy with his formula that really didn't go the way pi And so I kind of really I think it's a historical moment that we are here today and I feel it's an honor to be able to em this event and have so many incredible speakers to really talk about the really central question of what kind of systems do we design for human flourishing and as we think about this I hear that be we're in San Francisco we all can hear you know AI is the future AI is right now and there's a lot of anxiety that is built up and creates this incred incredible creative tension and innovation which is how do we figure out how to be on the right side of that question and everyone's hs together especially the conversations in this building are in and all over San Francisco is how do we make sure we are building our vote how do we want to be on the right side of that moat and as we figure that out I think there's two ways he can approach ambo either you know you build up on your moat you build up an island of your own you could build a bal castle and here we are at the bier towers the 16 floors. But here's the thing that I think that what's important about what David Casey has said it was setting the Judah on Hebrew flourishing which is that we're not here just to pillar mo but for society to w to build bridges out and so what are all those bridges we need to build and so what you just heard right now is 16 floors of incredible programming from the arts you have robotics you have hacking you have important questions if you make it all the way up to the 16th floor and we're going to I'm going to see who actually makes it up by the end of the day we're going to do some you know hand raises of how many steps did you get in is that how do we figure out how to build bridges literally from the bottom up we are on the second floor right now um on the ground floor this is a grassroo we're good and bow and figure out this treasure hunt so we're going to we're here all in this building we're going to shake it up and then we're going to see what comes out because this is an experiment so your job today is not just to figure out how do I build how do I get on the right side of history and of this AI you know innovation and how do I capture it but how do I build bridges out and that's why all the floors are here literally everything that we need to do to figure out society is in this room but the bridges have not been fully built and it is our job to do that as the attendees as the speakers and it is my job to help round those for us and I'm also going to niche here from all the fours of I'm going to leave you're on the round four and now one way to think about all the fours I'm going to give you a framework And then we're going to be using a kind of framing for the rest of the day. It's a simple navigation lens cuz it there's so much happen.

I mean, I just heard David say there's like what over 200s, right? And we've got over four hackathons. Is that one framing is to think about that there there's three layers happening all at the same time regardless of how many 16 floors and all the floors you want to fly. is that there's the hardware layer, there's the software layer, and those those are typically the two layers that we talked about the most. But as D talked about earlier is that we have to think about always the culture and that's the social wear there.

And that is our job today is to figure out how do we not just only build up the hardware and software, but how do we make connections to figure out all the socialware that has to be launched and all the bridges and all the coordination that had to happen. And especially in this moment as we now can all agree agents will outnumber human beings and we're agents to be successful. they will operate in multicloud multi- vendor environment and they will be doing things that we are not going to be able to always keep an eye on and so the question is do we see agents as extensions of us or do we see them you know as we've been talking about AI as this kind of a popular narrative around that it's like this thing that's against us that that we have to lock down now agents aren't always so foreign because if we see them as just a metaphor of nature we seen society approach nature in two ways. One is you see nature as an adversary. We have to control it.

We have to prune it. We have to you know actually burn it and make all these ways of of creating how it's going to serve us. Or we see nature as an extension of us. And you're going to see the ways that many communities here from indigenous communities to communities on the ground to hyperlocal ways that have kept this kind of approach nature alive which is seeing nature as an extension of us. And so we're going to see that as a common way uh throughout the day as a part of this discussion.

And so the goal for you is to shake it up to use this floor as a listening floor as a grounds floor here. But we're going to have conversations that challenge our assumptions of how do we think about agents, how do we think about human flourishing, and how do we sync up and how do we compare notes? And so I want this to be the floor for listening. And then what you need to do is leave this floor and go to the other floor to compare notes and make your way back down throughout the day when you want to come back and get some inspiration again. And so before I introduce the next speaker, I just want to remind everyone that there is um a coffee house, a tea house back there where you can get coffee and tea.

And then I've also been given the note that uh you cannot burn sage in this building. And apparently that is an issue. And I love that we are at a kind of festival where I as the MC need to make this announcement because usually I have to tell you where's the bathroom and how do you get out um in case there's an emergency and the schedule and all 16 floors. But I am also here to continually remind you that we are not able to burn sage in this building so that we don't get the fire department called upon us cuz we need to continue the conversations. What?

And and it has happened. David literally I was like I got this note last night. I was like are you serious? He's like absolutely it is real. We are not trying to make your job harder, Trisha.

I'm like great. Can I can make that announcement.

Polyanto.

You also cannot burn polyanto. You can also not smoke pot in the building, but we have many other ways to do that because we are in San Francisco and California where there's so many other ways to ingest all these amazing you know molecules without creating smoke and residue. And so with that talking about smoke and residue and you know um nature I'm really excited to bring up our next speaker David Da whose work I've been following for a while now in the space do no really sad to have you. I mean it you're not I know you're not going to burn stage as part of your session but you are practically from the rainforest. Um you are a chief uh David Doll is a chief scientist uh as he has arrived game for us and what I you did he literally fly in from Switzerland or okay and we have a very international crowd here.

So one of our our first speaker I can officially say flew in from Switzerland and made it here. He's won the X-P prize for game forest which you're going to tell us about really about rainforests and how you actually were able to use many of the technologies already mentioned this building uh decentralized uh tech alongside combining it with the socialware which is indigenous communities and really using their knowledge on how to prevent divorcation because they have managed our greatest one of our greatest resources for a long time. So what you're going to hear from Dave is really looking at socialware I mean the software which is centralized technology uh using many of the tool here we'll discuss in the siki board but then combining it with saying look the software is not enough we have to apply it to solving social problems and so what he did was he really bridged the decentralized technology with thinking about well how do we really figure out deforestation descertification and so his work is extensively referenced in a lot of the in the essay that really inspired David and his theme that his company for funding the conference for putting this conference on which is how do we not lose human judgments and thinking through what is a regenerative intelligence right work looks like so with that please welcome Dea and I'm excited for the rest of and minky for hanging out for us

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