What are Pittsburgh’s advantages over Silicon Valley?

For technologists who have questioned why they are in Pittsburgh instead of Silicon Valley, the career of researcher and entrepreneur Andrew Moore could be the inspiration and the reasoning needed to feel confident in their choice.

In his keynote Friday at Beyond Big Data, Pittsburgh Technology Council’s annual day-long AI/Machine Learning Summit, Moore shared the prompts that made him relocate to Pittsburgh, opportunities that kept him in the region and a sense of what Pittsburgh offers that isn’t found as easily in Silicon Valley.  

He also shared why he and his co-founders chose Pittsburgh in 2023 to start his company Lovelace AI.

Moore’s journey took him from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a professor, to Carnegie Mellon University to Google, where he was tasked with growing a fledgling Pittsburgh office. Then, it was back to CMU as a dean and a subsequent return to Google as a general manager and vice president before founding Lovelace AI. 

“If there’s something serious involving mathematics,” Moore said, “put a team together in Pittsburgh to do it.”

Moore says Google decided to put an office in Pittsburgh partially because of Pittsburgh’s reputation for getting things done. In its early days with just five employees, the local office embraced the concept of “earning the right” to build the most advanced technology, which eventually allowed them to participate “at a major level” at Google.

During his keynote, which was presented to an audience of over 250 attendees as an interview conducted by Pittsburgh Technology Council’s CEO Audrey Russo, Moore shared his views about the differences between his current hometown and Silicon Valley – and much of it revolved around the ability to get things done.

“You need a lot of belief if you are going to take big bets,” said Moore. “Silicon Valley is better at that than Pittsburgh. … Pittsburgh people are more specific about defining the problems.”

To illustrate that, he described a local company that was addressing money laundering. According to Moore, the company decided to use AI to make analysts twice as productive – and ended up getting “threefold productivity.”

“It was done in very Pittsburgh style. Taking a problem; let engineering do it — then move on. It was a clever statistic and did not use GenAI. It needed to be explainable.  

“There was a lot of pressure to call it generative AI because that’s what all the cool kids were using,” but the Pittsburgh team resisted that temptation. “On the coast, the approach might be different.”

Key takeaways 

With 2023’s emergence of Generative AI for the masses, and the world’s newfound acceptance of AI as a standard business tool, much of the Beyond Big Data Summit’s agenda discussed topics related to technology, governance, best practices and potential uses.

Manoj Mishra, senior VP of consulting services for CGI, kicked off the day at the Sheraton Hotel Pittsburgh at Station Square by talking about trends, including the belief that AI will become more decentralized.

During Moore’s session that followed, he outlined four possibilities for AI – as assistant, as guardian, as entertainer and the one he called the dark side – for oppression.

In subsequent sessions, panelists and presenters gave details in these areas and took the audience through other topics related to AI and machine learning.

In one panel, executives from Lucas Systems, Ecolab, Pittsburgh International Airport, Industrial Scientific and Giant Eagle outlined goals and challenges of their AI projects.

Andy Hannah, executive director of 1486 Labs, summed up what might be one of the most important reasons that the kinds of conversations that happened at Beyond Big Data are so important: Of the top 10 S&P companies, Berkshire Hathaway is the only nontech company on the list.