MORGANTOWN — Gavin Hall couldn’t help it — he had to tease Jenny Secreto about her smartphone.
“Wait. That’s like an iPhone 4, right?”
“Well, aren’t you the funny one, Mr. Technology.”
The setting was Morgantown High School. Hall graduated from there in 2003 and was back roaming the MHS halls Thursday morning.
Secreto is still on the English faculty and remembers him in her classes.
For the record, the handheld device Secreto was using to snap photographs isn’t nearly as outdated as her former student was making it out to be.
However, her handle for him is accurate, even if she said it with a chuckle.
Hall, a kid from the Kingwood Pike with a bent for numbers — even if he did struggle initially in math — graduated from WVU with three simultaneous degrees in mathematics, mechanical engineering and physics.
After graduate school in robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and employment at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he signed on with Elon Musk and Tesla.
“I knew he was smart,” Secreto said of the 36-year-old MHS alum. “I just didn’t know he was that smart.”
Hall came back to his old school because of a time-honored lesson plan formulated by the English teacher. The assignment: To craft a formal business letter to a personality or company of choice.
The intent of the letter was to introduce oneself, Secreto said, while also talking about MHS and West Virginia. It’s about making a proper impression by way of the written word.
A number of students wrote to Elon Musk and Tesla — to which the teacher instructed a less-formal aside. She told them to include a P.S., dropping Hall’s name.
The letters made to the desk of the magnate, who summoned Hall to his office: “Guess who I heard from?”
So Hall called on the students, and that English teacher, in person on Thursday.
From Mohigan to Musk
During his time at Tesla, Hall has helped create the artificial intelligence systems that run the electric car maker’s “gigafactories” from Austin, Texas, to Shanghai.
In Tesla’s world, the gigafactory is where the batteries that power the company’s signature sleek, futuristic-looking vehicles are made.
While Musk isn’t shy about saying artificial intelligence makes him nervous, he also values efficiency over everything, Hall said.
For Hall, who plays bass guitar to classic country music and 1960s Motown, AI is the way.
And that’s whether your thoughts on such technology are informed by, say, Philip K. Dick, the speculative writer who worried about the dark side of robots, or Walt Disney, who cheerfully had a gleaming, utopic “Tomorrowland” take on his vision of things to come.
To create AI, Hall said, means doing so with the idea that the technology is going to eventually supplant human endeavor — which makes the intentions of the person or entities writing the initial programs all the more critical, he said.
There’s also the linear journey.
At the gigafactory in Reno, Nev., for example, Musk went at it with a new call for hypo-efficiency, to which Hall obliged.
There was only one problem.
Said factory was so efficient that it kept shutting itself down — “It took us five months to get that figured out,” he said.
Finding the program — and getting with it
Growing up, it also took Hall a little bit of time to get his internal programming synced with his professional aspirations. Math, as said, didn’t come easy at first, and physics didn’t either.
Secreto remembers him as a big, genial kid who did well in her classes and on the varsity baseball team.
On Thursday, back in the halls of his alma mater, he dispensed some advice. It was oh-so-20th century, he allowed, but it’s still compatible.
“If you’re into tech, NASA’s right down the road,” he said, referring to the space agency’s Independent Verification and Validation facility in South Fairmont, Marion County.
“You can get an internship while you’re still in high school,” the AI expert advised.
“If you don’t know what you want to do yet, you’ll still want to study and get good grades. It’ll work out.”
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