At 12:16 pm, President Ken Schaefer, called the meeting to order at the Intercontinental Hotel. Ken thanked the volunteers helping at the meeting, Jeff Sulzbach and Tim McNiff were the greeters, Bill Collins for his introduction of guests and Happy Dollars, Steve Young for the Inspirational Minute and Four Way Test, Steve spoke about his experience of helping a lost 6 year old girl at the Rotary 4th of July fireworks at the Cathedral and how as Rotarians, we were able to reunite the family while keeping her safe in the chaos of the thunderstorm, our amazing IT tech team of Rob Thomas and Andrew Vincelli and the scribe, Linda Mulhern. We had a couple of guests Ezra who is moving to St Paul and works with UNICEF, and Huzaifa, who is looking for a Rotary club to join and has been active with Camp RYLA while in India and Pakistan.
Karin Ciano introduced our speaker, Richard Theime. He has been speaking about AI (artificial intelligence) for the past 35 years. We must learn to interact with a different culture and that “we shouldn’t go where you don’t know”. AI will transform everything and everyone should have a fundamental understanding of AI while maintaining both an “over and under trust” of the information provided. As humans, we need to gain a sixth sense of machine intelligence and be willing to do additional research if the information does not hold true. He spoke of KIMI released by China recently and how effective it is but also, we don’t know what type of monitoring is done by the Chinese by those who use it. He reiterated that we shouldn’t trust the system, while also challenging it to do better. Richard spoke about the “prompts”, which are the natural personality of AI, it will wait patiently for additional information from the slow human user. He uses ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini interchangeably and what information is produced by one, he will provide to another. He said that when he initially wanted to speak about AI, he wrote his speech about hackers and AI on his own and then requested Claude to provide topics, which provided 6, when inputted into Gemini and Chat GPT, he eventually ended up with 25 topics to speak about hackers use of AI. AI is multimodal, so it pulls all the information from the internet, books and even videos to answer questions. It doesn’t know what it is saying but finds relationships with all of the tokens (prompts) available and can find exponential growth. He noted that one advantage of people having philosophy degrees is that they can think “deeper” when AI provides the superficial answers rather than what could be provided, so there is an advantage for people with the “original unneeded degrees” from a university! AI has not found a way to think “deeply” yet. We are currently at an inflection point while dealing with a meta system and do not quite understand it, so we MUST understand it and engage with it. Young people are afraid of it from the standpoint of their future ability to find employment and like any technology it takes time to catch up with reality. He said that ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are all good places to start and if you want to work with a more advanced AI, can pay a subscription rate of approximately $20 per month.
Richard was given a certificate for his time by Ken and money will be donated to the YMCA homeless youth program. Paul Harris awards were distributed by Brianna Haglin at the meeting today to Helen Wagner, Rob Thomas, Alison Brown, Karin Ciano, Carolyn Will, Jason DeKeuster and Susan Rostkowksi. There were several Happy Dollars; Dick Nicholson noted a new grandchild, Thanks from Jason DeKeuster for his roast last week and that he survived it, Melissa Musliner talked about her ex-husband watching AI movies in the past and how it has become the new reality.
Ken asked if we had a volunteer to lead the Service Opportunities position for the club, please let him know if you have any interest.