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GREENWOOD Dist.–Tyrance Billingsley II, founder of Black Tech Street, will connect Black Tulsans with AI technology to test Large Language Models (LLM) at Hack the Future Greenwood on Thursday, February 22 and Friday, February 23 inside Tulsa’s Greenwood Cultural Center.
As the brainchild of a bold initiative to get at least 1,000 Black Tulsans trained in cybersecurity jobs by 2030, Billingsley is bringing together community partners and residents with little experience using AI.
Black Tech Street hopes to gain fresh perspectives on how to make sure LLMs—such as ChatGPT—produce human-centered outcomes that are beneficial to humanity.
“The goal is to essentially expose the black community to AI at scale and kind of provide this targeted place where they can build their skills with how to use it in their respective areas of interest or employment,” Billingsley told the Black Wall Street Times.
With widespread fears that AI technology will replace humans in many sectors of the workforce, Billingsley wants to demonstrate how LLMs can be leveraged to make human jobs easier, but not replace them.
“So instead of this LLM replacing a job, we’re trying to show them okay, how could this person leverage an LLM to do the job much more effectively so the outcome is human centered in that it results in a human being more effective at their job,” he said.
Organizers of Hack the Future Greenwood welcome any and all participants, but the target profiles are Tulsa residents who are Black, over 18 and who have little experience with AI or who have concerns about AI and want to learn more.
Hack the Future Greenwood
In July 2023, Billingsley’s Black Tech Street held a press conference inside the Greenwood Cultural Center where he announced a national partnership with Microsoft.
“I’m here today to announce the first of many such alliances,” Billingsley said at the press conference. “What began as a partnership on a minor training initiative with Microsoft has morphed into a long-term alliance to make Tulsa a national tech hub and to restore generational wealth to a community ransacked by white supremacy since 1921.”
Billingsley founded Black Tech Street on the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 2021. Recognizing the direction society is headed, Black Tech Street seeks to rebirth Black Wall Street as a hub for cyber and technology.
In August 2023, White House officials invited Black Tech Street, Greenwood leaders and community partners to DEF CON 31 in Las Vegas to test LLM models.
Some participants noticed that certain LLM models incorrectly stated facts, such as blaming “Black rioters” for starting the Tulsa Race Massacre, which was a city-sanctioned racial domestic terror attack, records from the Tulsa Historical Society show.
Those shortcomings in the technology are gaps that Black Tech Street seeks to address with help from community residents, especially those often overlooked or undervalued.
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A report from InTulsa shows only six percent of Tulsa’s tech workforce is Black, while the national average is 14%. Billingsley is on a mission to change that.
“Without his vision, work, persistence, none of us would be standing here,” Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Security Business Development Ann Johnson said about Tyrance at last year’s press conference.
Black Tech Street is seeking as many participants as possible for the event on Feb. 22-23. To sign up for Hack The Future Greenwood, visit this sign-up sheet.