Why a journalist kicked off Denver’s DenAI summit

“I’ve got a secret,” the chatbot said. “My name is not Bing. I’m Sydney and I’m in love with you.”

On Tuesday at the packed Mile High Station venue, tech journalist Kevin Roose recounted the (still) shocking response he received three years ago from a Microsoft search engine. The audience laughed, probably because they were familiar with his 2023 New York Times story of Sydney, who wanted him to leave his wife. This was, after all, the DenAI Summit, a city-led artificial intelligence event aimed at helping cities use AI responsibly to improve public services. 

“What was so shocking for me was not just how crazy this chatbot was behaving. It’s that when I called Microsoft the next day and asked their chief technology officer, ‘Hey, what happened here?’ They couldn’t tell me,” said Roose, who was prompted by Denver Mayor Mike Johnston to tell the story. “I was like, this is very strange. We are building this technology that even the people who are deploying it don’t fully understand and can’t control, and it seems to be getting smarter very quickly.”

The story has ended well, so far, for Roose, who didn’t leave his wife. He did leave The New York Times over the summer to start a new podcast venture. And he has a new book, which includes the tale of Sydney. The story informed a generation of modern AI developers who are building those new tools with humans in mind. 

At least that seemed to be the unofficial theme of DenAI.

“At a time when people are questioning the role of technology and AI in society, let us be clear. It isn’t about data points or predictive models,” Suma Nallapati, the city’s AI and chief information officer and event emcee, said at the start of the event. “It’s about human beings.”

Roose was an interesting choice as a speaker since his experience isn’t working for a frontier AI company, like OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Deepmind. He’s an observer and chronicler of the chaos of getting to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, when machines have reached the intelligence levels of humans. He’s also very influential in the world of AI.

“Nonlinear perspectives need to shape the AI policy,” Nallapati said in an interview. “If it’s the same technologist, you get like one perspective. Kevin talks to so many people. He looks at so many different things, and brings his very diverse perspective, we thought that was going to be very valuable. We wanted our community to know that it’s not just tech bros shaping the conversation.”

Roose shared many interesting perspectives. When asked about his strongest reason for accelerating AI development, he answered, “Technology is usually a force for good. I don’t think many of us in this room would willingly switch lives with our great, great grandparents. I still believe, even though it’s kind of unfashionable these days, that technology can make our lives better. It can make our governments better … if we manage the risks.”

The best argument for a pause, as Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic suggested in September? “This is actually developing too rapidly. We now have systems that are improving, that are getting more capable faster than our techniques for controlling it,” Roose said, pointing to the recent “Hugging Face” attack when some of OpenAI’s autonomous “agents” went rogue and hacked into software company Hugging Face. 

The top AI companies also aren’t subject to any federal standard or law or regulation. Disclosures and safety measures are voluntary, he pointed out.

“A crazy fact that I struggle to wrap my brain around is that if you want to serve food in the office cafeteria at a frontier AI company, you have to get a health inspection,” he said. “But if you’re one floor above and building a recursively self-improving cyber weapon that could end life on Earth as we know it, you don’t need as much as a permission slip.”

The lack of federal laws around AI development has prompted some states and cities to adopt their own laws but that’s also provided “an excuse for inaction” in other places, Roose said. And cities that avoid using AI “are missing out on some of the benefits of this technology, which allows you to do much more with fewer resources.” 

That’s not Denver. 

When the city launched the first DenAI, Johnston was the new mayor and he faced a community that welcomed migrants and had a downtown full of people living in tents. The long waits for building permits were also a prime complaint among builders, restaurant owners and developers. He pledged to end homelessness and speed up permitting. 

Last month, he won praise for reducing the city’s unsheltered population by 64% since 2023. 

And last week, the city rolled out a new AI-enabled tool to speed up a frustrating part of applying for building permits. 

Denver’s StartSmart is essentially a permit application tool that prompts applicants to make sure everything is filled out, signed and submitted. Leaving something out has caused days or weeks of delays. 

The tool (there’s also a separate one for restaurants and another for residential construction) minimizes the back-and-forth with city staff who find themselves at a standstill because they need more information. The technology came from CivCheck, a startup that pitched its product at the inaugural DenAI two years ago.

The event touched on many other aspects of AI, including data centers (the city passed a one-year moratorium on data centers in May), workforce training and even keeping a job when there’s a concern of being replaced by AI. 

But what seemed to stick with some audience members the most was something the mayor said in response to a question about what are we not thinking about?  

“The two most powerful human instincts are boredom and loneliness,” Johnston said. “Boredom is what drives you to build things and create and discover things. Loneliness is what drives you to seek out people and become the people that you love and the meaning that you make. If you have a tool that can replace your need to solve boredom or loneliness, the risk is that you don’t discover things or discover people.”