(serene piano music)
The fact of the matter is that sharks
are not super-predators in the oceans,
people are the super-predators in the oceans,
in terms of what we're doing to change ocean ecosystems.
Life would be very different without sharks
and very clearly would not be better for us.
(waves splashing)
What do you think is the most dangerous shark in the oceans?
The bull shark, the tiger shark,
and the great white shark?
Are like the top three most dangerous sharks.
But, all things considered,
you know.
They're not very dangerous.
Not very dangerous.
Like a selfie's more dangerous.
Selfie! (laughs)
A hot dog's more dangerous.
That's true.
We have pretty frank conversations, he and I, about sharks,
and it's not something that we, ignore,
it's something we talk about directly.
'Cause I want him, a pretty smart kid,
to process that there are things out there
that he needs to respect.
I think the thing that creates fear
is a lack of understanding.
If you don't understand the data about what a shark is,
when it's around, you start to fear them.
So that's why the AI is cool to me.
'Cause it's creating this new stream of new data,
which helps us get to that point
of thoughtful respect for these creatures.
It's an interesting time in the United States.
There's now more great white sharks spotted off the coast
than we've ever seen before.
And there's not a great resource
for understanding those populations.
You can use cool technology, like drones,
to look for sharks, look for wildlife.
You can use really cool software,
like artificial intelligence,
to be able to search all that video and if you're a seal
that's up close to the surface,
if you're a dolphin that's close to the surface,
if you're a shark that's close to the surface,
it'll be able to see it.
With this particular project
we're using two different technologies
that are available at Salesforce.
What we've done is we've taken
the Field Surface Lightning platform and we've coupled it
with Einstein Vision.
And so we've built a special model, a special AI model,
that understands sharks.
Specifically, great white sharks and their sizes.
Nature creates, in theory, so much data,
in practice nobody has the time to look at the ocean
for hours and hours and then count that one chart.
And so AI can kind of automate things
that no human could do.
If ever there was a time in ocean history
where we needed these tools, we needed this intelligence,
we needed more AI and smart people and new communities
trying to put tools together, it's now.
We want to understand.
How is climate change affecting them?
Why are they coming to the coast
in larger and larger numbers and for longer periods of time?
We can have really current, up-to-the minute information,
hopefully, and make a really good, educated assessment
on whether this is a good day to swim or not.
We're getting texts everyday that tell us
what the AI's picking up and what it's not picking up.
We can use AI to identify and educate us on the movements
and the sizes and the activity
of some of these juvenile great white sharks.
I didn't really know how this was gonna go down.
(phone pings)
Sharks blowing up here on my phone.
I'm gonna ignore that.
Hang on a sec.
Do you want me
to talk about this?
Yeah, go.
We saw one great white shark just North of Creek Mouth,
it looked around ten feet, smaller that the individual
we saw yesterday.
Started close to shore, swam around 100 meters out.
Sounds like there's another shark down there.
Your son's down there.
Yeah, right so.
So Fin just, dropped him off at surf camp at nine, right?
Which is, you know, just minutes
before the text came in.
It changes the way that I'm thinking about my day.
So this is sort of what this is about.
It's about trying to understand a little bit more
about what's going on down there on the beach,
so his camp counselors can make a smarter decision
about how much time to spend in the water.
(ethereal music)
We all communicate with the other surf camps
and the other surf instructors on the beach.
It's just better, additional information that lets us,
in theory, maybe get a step ahead.
I think that's the value of this project
is really using the AI to get this data stream
so that they can do what they love, which is in this case,
connect to the oceans, fall in love with the oceans,
but do it more safely than they were doing
before we started this.
It's up to us as researchers, in both AI
and collaborating with people in other fields
to find the most positive-use cases and actually
double down and work on those.
Wanna go surf?
Yeah.
Let's do it, okay!
Come on!
My goal is to catch 20 waves.
20 waves?
I wanna catch 30 waves, okay?
Okay, try!
Here's a big tech company, but they care about the oceans.
They care about making sure that these same tools are useful
for people in a community like mine.
This is exactly what our Benioff Ocean Initiative is about.
Take some smart people, some smart tools,
maybe originally built for another purpose.
But you bring it in to help with something that's,
you might say, more important,
which is about community safety,
about the future of our oceans,
about the kids, right?
That for me is, like, the essence
of what AI-approved good is.
Woo hoo!
