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  • 🤖💡 NY Tech AI Pulse: AI Events + Practical AI Insights + AI Community Updates in NYC 🧠🚀🌆

🤖💡 NY Tech AI Pulse: AI Events + Practical AI Insights + AI Community Updates in NYC 🧠🚀🌆

Author

Frederike Falke
January 13, 2025

Welcome to NYTech AI Pulse, your weekly connection to New York's AI community. We're connecting AI enthusiasts, builders and innovators in NYC to share, learn and inspire each other about the possibilities of AI. See someone missing from our community? Share this newsletter and help us grow the city's AI ecosystem. Now, let's dive in!

What we cover today

  • Upcoming AI Events in town

  • AI News and Insights

  • Community Updates

📅 Upcoming AI Events in Town

Next Week:

  • Mon, 13th Jan: CryptoMondays AI Agents (DeAI) - Join this monthly meetup learning and talking about AI agents at the intersection of AI and Web3

  • Mon, 13th Jan: Artificial Intelligence in Retail: A Venture Capital Perspective - Join for an afternoon of talks and keynote speeches on AI-powered retail, practical AI and AI-led moderation and wine-tasting (afternoon event)

  • Tue, 14th Jan: NYC AI Salon Meetup - Join this informal in-person meetup to meet and share best practices, learnings and insights about generative AI and how we can shape and invision and create the future with it

  • Tue, 14th Jan: AI/ML Conversations Meetup: Learnable 3D Structures - Join in to learn about the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning with networking and a talk about “Hitting a ‘NeRF’”

  • Tue, 14th Jan: Agentic Ales with aampe - This meetup is all about how agentic Ai changes the customer engagement landscape and how AI allows for more than traditional rule-based systems

  • Tue, 14th Jan: ACTIVATE: AI Hack Night @ Ramp HQ - Take part in a AI Hack night to network, hack and build and listen to demo presentations

  • Tue, 14th Jan: Health2Tech NYC January - Series of Digital Health Events - Join in to learn about the clinical AI landscape from Kanishka Rao, a Forbes 30 under 30 for healthcare, who is building an AI-driven care management platform

  • Tue, 14th Jan: Crosscurrents Fireside Chat & Mixer - Supercharging Retail with AI - Mix, mingle and enjoy a conversation with Roger Fo, talking about the way AI applications change the retail market. Roger is the CEO of an AI company focused on automating checkout processes and driving profitability for retail companies

  • Tue, 14th Jan: SurrealDB January Meetup - This is for developers and those working with data, including Vector Search and Knowledge Graphs to build their AI applications. The meetup features two talks and networking

  • Wed, 15th Jan: AI Meetup: GenAI, LLMs and ML - This is a technical meetup where you will learn and potentially also build how to use AI, topics to be announced

  • Wed, 15th Jan: 3DNY - This meetup is for those interested in Architectural Visualization and Visual Effects and how technologies like AI, VR, the Metaverse and more effect and change the industry - a bit specific, but think about how you could use some of these visualizations for your content generation 😉 

  • Wed, 15th Jan: How to Prepare for AI's Industry Transformation and Job Market Disruption? - Join an AI event at the China Institute of America gaining insights into emerging AI-driven trends by talks of experts from McKinsey & Company, venture capital and asset management

  • Thu, 16th Jan: LECTURE: Technical Communication for Founders - That’s not so much about AI, but about the bridge of technical and non-technical communication and as it is super-important, also in AI development, I list here too

  • Thu, 16th Jan: XR Design Meetup - Touch Some Grass* x MIT Reality Hack - This meetup is all about mixing and mingling in the field of experiential technology like XR, AI and Blockchain

  • Thu, 16th Jan: AI & Automation with Elastic: January Meetup - Join Elastics first meetup of the year with two inspirational and quite technical talks and networking - “Autogenerated IDs in Elasticsearch” and “Leveraging Elastic Stack to Protect Millions from SIGRed”

  • Sat, 18th Jan: AI Agents for Faster Renewable Energy Projects - This is a two-day hackathon building products in the clean energy space, but if you are only in for the results and feedback - come Sunday 1pm - 3pm for pitching and networking

  • Sat, 18th Jan: LFC.DEV - Hackathon v1 w/ Banc of Cal @ Fractal Tech - Take part in a hackathon with the focus on social applications based on the AT Protocol - an open, decentralized network for building social applications.

The Week After:

After That:

💡 AI Highlights, Insights & Ideas

Nr. 1: The Concept of Pair Programming and why it is such a powerful concept in the era of AI

Before we start, let’s dive into what pair programming is, so that everyone not familiar with code and programming can catch up and gain some basic understanding.

What is Pair Programming?

Pair Programming describes a form of joint working:

  • Two programmers work together on the same task at the same time.

  • The rules of the game:

    • One programmer is the “driver” who writes the code

    • The other programmer is the “navigator” who reviews the code and provides guidance

    • The programmers frequently switch roles, sometimes as often as every 15 minutes

Why is it such a powerful concept in the era of AI?

Because AI is your perfect pair programmer. AI models like Claude, Amazon Nova, DeepSeek and others are able to write code for you, they help you troubleshoot when you are stuck and they give you explanations and step-by-step guidelines, when you need more detailed support.

The versatility of these models allows you to model them to the role in which you need them the most given your current state of work.

  • When you are stuck, copy your code into the chat and let them analyze and review it as the ‘navigator’, while you are re-writing the code

  • When you are unsure about the next steps in your project, specify as clearly and specific as possible, what you are looking to build and let AI help you with various options and its pros and cons as a ‘navigator’

  • When you figured out, how to build what you want to build from a conceptual perspective, let AI be the ‘driver’ and write the code for you

In that way, AI becomes your pair programmer in a way as you need it and is most beneficial for you.

And if you are not sure, in which moments AI should take on which role - you may even ask various AI models for feedback.

Does this mean, that AI does the job better than a human pair programmer? No and yes. It depends on your situation, clarity and availability.

Tips for AI Pair Programming

  • Use it when you need it, not as a fixed concept to always or never use.

  • It is especially beneficial, if you want to learn a new concept or new field, but even for those who call themselves proficient in what they do, challenges always arise and in these cases, the pair programming concept is quite effective

  • Forget about the idea of Pair programming and call it instead Pair Working - the idea that you have a second worker next to you, who works on the same task with you and helps you as needed in your task execution:

    • Pair Working for more effective hooks in Content Writing

    • Pair Working for a better CV to be sent to your next potential employer

    • Pair Working for a legal friction you have and a first-version answer that may help you to clarify your next steps

    • Pair Working for …. → you can extend that list endlessly!

A Quote by Jeremy Howard of fast.ai on the concept of Pair Programming and Pair Working or how he calls it: Dialog Engineering

“Instead of asking AI to generate hundreds of lines of code at once, you work together in small steps. You might write a line or two, then have the AI suggest the next piece. This creates a powerful feedback loop where each step makes both you and the AI smarter. The code you create is cleaner, more maintainable, and more powerful than what either human or AI could create alone.”

Jeremy Howard, Ex-President and Chief Scientist kaggle

Nr. 2: Additional AI Insights

DeepSeek: If you haven’t tried this free new AI model, then I encourage you to do so. It is rather good in giving you explanations of what it is doing as well as being less complex at times than i.e. Claude and provides you with at times much more ‘close-to-your-real-voice’ text adaptations - good for i.e. content

Linkedin’s Jobs on the Rise 2025: If we look at the top 25 fastest-growing jobs in the U.S., then we find the AI engineer, AI consultant and AI researcher among them. What is eye-catching is the low female percentage in these roles, ranging from 20-30%, while for all other roles in the list despite sales managers, the numbers are reversed.

While I was attending NY Tech Week in June 2024, the speakers at a Women in AI event explicitly pointed out that the tech scene and rise of tech were mainly steered by men and they hope that it will be more balanced in the case of AI. I feel there is a need to not only excite men about AI, but everyone to create a balanced development of AI-powered systems and tools.

We will soon host a 'She Builds AI’ event in town, where we will showcase women founders in AI. Stay tuned for details or if you want to be showcased and support.

🧠 AI Innovation Insights

A real-world experimental study examining AI's ability to pass university exams reveals concerning findings. Research shows:

  • 94% of AI-written exam submissions went undetected by university markers

  • AI submissions consistently outperformed real students, averaging half a grade boundary higher

  • Across modules, there was an 83.4% chance that AI submissions would outperform randomly selected student submissions

  • Only 16% of real student submissions achieved higher grades than AI submissions

  • Simple similarity checks and standard academic misconduct policies proved ineffective at detecting AI use

  • The detectability rate was even lower (3.17%) when considering cases specifically flagged as potential AI use

Key Takeaway: This study demonstrates that current AI systems can successfully infiltrate university examination systems while remaining virtually undetectable and achieving superior performance compared to human students. Rather than being a theoretical concern, this represents an immediate practical threat to academic integrity that challenges traditional assessment methods. The research suggests universities must fundamentally rethink their approach to student assessment in an era where AI assistance is both powerful and difficult to detect.

🚀 Community Highlights

Our own Upcoming Events in Q1 2024

We are actively looking for venues for our next AI events in town. As soon as we have found a venue, we will be sharing more details.

Find here a preview of our upcoming events:

  • AI for Creators (Feb) - Sharing best practices in creating content with AI and helpful AI prompts for creators

  • She Builds AI (Feb/Mar) - Showcasing Women Founders in AI and bringing AI enthusiasts and innovators together

  • Hands-on NoCode AI Workshops for non-technical professionals who want to effectively use AI in their day-to-day

If you are interested in supporting, showcasing and providing a venue, pleaselet us know.

Showcasing Founders and Builders in AI

We are actively looking for AI Builders in town to shwocase their products and ventures. If you are interested in showcasing your work, please send us details of what you are working on.

🤝 Get Involved

  • Share Your Story: Building in NY Tech AI? We'd love to feature you!

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Your NY Tech AI Team

Want to be featured? Have feedback? Reply to this email or reach out on LinkedIn. Let’s build it together! 🗽🚀💡