Miami mayor sees AI thaw as a good thing and may run for president

City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, the first American politician to take his official salary in bitcoin, thinks the recent resurgence of artificial intelligence is a sign that the current crypto winter will end. 

“That’s exciting for me,” Suarez told The Block after he held a wide ranging discussion on artificial intelligence with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the eMerge Americas 2023 conference in Miami. “That’s when the use cases come up. When you thawed out of that AI winter, that’s when when all of these incredible use cases came up. I think that’s a great opportunity for us.”

Schmidt, who served as CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, recounted a similar period of AI winter before the current explosion of language-based models.

“Many decades ago, when I was a grad student, AI was really hot. And the only problem is none of it worked, for all sorts of reasons,” Schmidt said, referring to a winter period during which he went on to work on other things. “There was this explosion of new AI techniques that started in roughly 2011. And then all the sudden computers got better at vision than humans. That’s a pretty big deal. And they they started playing games better than humans.”

Suarez, a Republican who leads the U.S. Conference of Mayors, in 2021 became the first American politician to take an official salary in bitcoin, announcing the plan just days before the cryptocurrency reached an all-time high of $68,789. He’s also been a vocal proponent of positioning Miami as a new center of tech, finance and crypto.

Presidential jokes?

Suarez also mentioned activity that could signal broader future plans.

“I just came from New Hampshire. I won’t tell you what I was doing over there,” Suarez told Schmidt, who was quick note the state was important for Republicans in presidential elections.

“The mayor is freezing himself to get ready to run in New Hampshire,” Schmidt joked, soliciting widespread applause. “That’s the headline.”

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