AI Summer Starts in Buffalo, the City of Light

Trip 3 to 6 June 2024 · Written up 6 June 2024 · Last expanded 29 September 2026

Buffalo is where my AI Summer started. The plan was to zig-zag across the continent for a few months, hitting conferences, workshops and meetings on the latest in AI (from automatic reasoning to computational social science, which is a deliberately wide net). Buffalo was the computational social science leg, which meant ICWSM, the International Conference on Web and Social Media, in June.

AAAI’s choice of Buffalo seemed curious to me at first. Walking around downtown, the art deco is everywhere (which tells you how enormous the money once was), and it is also fairly obvious that the city’s economic star faded a long time ago, so it is an odd backdrop for a conference about what the web and social media are doing to us right now.

The City of Light

A chance conversation in a hotel elevator changed my view of the place, and I have been chewing on it ever since. Buffalo was once known as “The City of Light”, having played a pivotal role in electrification, which was an era of explosive growth fueled by technological innovation not unlike this one, and Buffalo was right in the middle of it.

Generative AI is the closest parallel to that I have witnessed, and possibly a more profound one than the advent of the web. GTC 2024 was the turning point (NVIDIA more or less declared the era open), and nearly every event on my summer calendar was grappling in one way or another with what large language and diffusion models mean for its field.

Power is crucial, mindshare is paramount

The electrification analogy only goes so far, though. Proximity to Niagara Falls powered the dynamo of progress the first time around, and access to power is still crucial for AI infrastructure, so it survives that far. The paramount input now, however, is mindshare (talent, research groups, the people who decide where things get built), and mindshare does not run downhill from a waterfall.

So I keep looking north. Toronto has been a beacon of novel AI research for decades (I would put it second in North America only to Silicon Valley), and if the tsunami of planned Federal and private investment in this domain is borne out, it may end up affecting this region more than anyone currently anticipates. Whether Buffalo, and cities like it, can find a renewed purpose in the AI age is an open question, but it looked a lot less far-fetched by the end of the week than it did from the airport.

“Will AI replace us?”

The conference itself fit a pattern I watched repeat all summer: the room starts from apprehension, some version of “Will AI replace us?”, and lands on “No, but it is a powerful tool we can leverage!” I saw it with humanities research and AI at Georgia Tech, with the computational social scientists in Buffalo, and later with the mathematicians in Miami, with only the vocabulary changing between them.

I got out to Niagara on that trip too, which I described at the time as a Zen sundae with a sprinkle of commerce, and I still think that is about the most accurate review of the place I can give (the falls take care of the sublime part on their own, and the commerce takes care of itself).

Buffalo was the first leg, Miami was next, and by the time the summer ran out the whole run spanned Buffalo to Boston. I still keep coming back to that elevator conversation, though, since the first City of Light got its second act from a waterfall it happened to be standing next to, and it is not at all obvious what the equivalent is now.

Photographs

Some interesting posters

Links

The ICWSM 2024 program and the AAAI conference page. To be added.

Open entry
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