A new center run by the nonprofit group Choose New Jersey will pitch the Garden State to California businesses — specifically film and television in Hollywood and artificial intelligence, or AI, in the Silicon Valley region.
The center will be the sixth office run by Choose New Jersey, which is financed by several of the state’s largest companies and utilities and pays for the several economic outreach efforts by the state. It’s stated mission is to attract business to New Jersey, and it has paid for Gov. Phil Murphy to travel on economic trade missions.
The new center will officially open on July 15 in San Francisco, typically considered the heart of Silicon Valley, a long-established high-tech center.
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“The West Coast has long been considered the home of the tech and film industries, but a whole new world of opportunity is emerging right here in the Garden State,” Gov. Phil Murphy said in the Wednesday announcement.
Murphy and his entourage previously toured the West Coast this spring in a bid to pitch New Jersey to businesses in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
The center will be staffed solely by Choose New Jersey’s chief strategy officer, Tim Crouch, a former executive at the United Kingdom’s foreign trade office, who worked primarily in North America.
According to the announcement, Crouch “will make frequent visits to Southern California and the Pacific Northwest, meeting with some of the world’s most innovative companies as they expand beyond their home markets in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.”
“As they are looking to tap into new markets, new ideas, and new talent, my job is to make sure they know about the amazing things happening” in New Jersey, Crouch said.
What will the Choose NJ center do?
Ingrid Austin, a spokesperson for Choose NJ, said the centers already open in Germany, Israel, India, Ireland and Taiwan have led to an explosion of business interest in New Jersey.
Dozens of companies have committed to moving to New Jersey from those countries since 2018, Austin said.
Joseph Foudy, a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, said it’s “very hard to prove one way or the other” on the effectiveness of these kinds of centers.
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Foudy said these types of centers are increasingly used by countries, states and cities across the world.
“It just raises visibility for you as a location for someone that might not know” about the area, Foudy continued.
As often touted by state officials, New Jersey is situated between the job markets of New York City and Philadelphia, sits along the Interstate 95 corridor and Northeast Corridor rail line, and boasts two major research universities: Rutgers and Princeton, along with their supply of talent.
And the state has a wide array of tax subsidy programs that businesses will want to tap into, Foudy said.
Those programs are meant to boot large corporations, start-ups, film and television projects and redevelopment projects.
Robert Scott, an economist at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, said that “attracting only one or two businesses to open operations in New Jersey more than pays for the expense of the ancillary office.”
What is AI? What’s it used for?
AI, and more specifically generative AI, is a technology that processes data from the internet like a human brian to create content — text, pictures, video and music — based on user’s instructions.
Its emergence has meant that people who weren’t computer scientists and didn’t know how to write code could get their computer to perform tasks in seconds that would have take them minutes, hours or days to do in the past: respond to emails, write marketing brochures, design a magazine cover.
Generative AI could be used for more mundane tasks that could otherwise take hours or days, and data searching becomes easier.
At the forefront was OpenAi, a company based in San Francisco founded in 2015 to create a generative AI platform available to the public.
Its financial backers have included Elon Musk, Amazon and Microsoft. And it has rolled out ChatGPT, which generates text, and DALL-E, which generates digital images, with new versions providing increasingly human-like responses.
It’s a sector Murphy has referred to as a “moonshot” industry in the Garden State.
“It’s like a Wild West,” said Aaron Price, chief executive officer of Tech United, a trade group for New Jersey’s high-tech industry.
What are the downsides to AI?
The technology comes with massive downsides.
The federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency warned that ahead of the 2024 elections, generative AI could be used by foreign adversaries, cybercriminals and any member of the public to depict political figures in compromising positions or saying controversial statements that they didn’t actually make.
USA TODAY reported on the prevalence of AI-generated nude images of famous and non-famous people alike. Graphic images generated of Taylor Swift were one glaring example. ChatGPT meanwhile has been used to generate academic essays by students, essentially a form of cheating.
“It needs some guardrails,” Teik Lim, president of the Newark-based New Jersey Institute of Technology, said in an interview this spring.
Movies and TV filmed in New Jersey
Since 2018, New Jersey state officials have approved over $720 million in tax subsidies for film, television and “digital media” productions, public records show.
They include support for Audible in Newark, Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” which was filmed in Paterson, and Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead,” filmed in Atlantic City, as well as the “Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark” and World Wrestling Entertainment in the Meadowlands.
That doesn’t count the massive film studios coming to New Jersey — including Netflix in Fort Monmouth, Lionsgate in Newark, 1888 Studios in Bayonne and another studio in West Orange — and the ones already here, such as Cinelease Studios in Jersey City.
“I’m sure they’re thinking that with Netflix opening the large studio in former Fort Monmouth that they might be able to capitalize on that decision by enticing other similar or complimentary businesses to the state,” said Scott, the Monmouth economist.
State officials estimate that more than $2 billion has been spent on film projects and the ancillary economy in New Jersey since 2018.
Many state officials and film industry insiders say New Jersey’s massive film and television tax credit program has bolstered the industry in the Garden State.
“Making the math work is a big deal,” Murphy said of the tax subsidies in a sit-down interview with NorthJersey.com. “It’s table-stakes necessary.”
Daniel Munoz covers business, consumer affairs, labor and the economy for NorthJersey.com and The Record.
Email: munozd@northjersey.com; Twitter:@danielmunoz100 and Facebook
