Conference poses questions over the AI revolution, Canadian sovereignty, and the rules shaping what comes next.

Open-source, or closed? Green grids, or gas? Job security, or distrust? Who—or what—owns the future? 

Those were just a few of the questions posed Monday night as Web Summit Vancouver kicked off its sophomore conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre, where it welcomed the 20,000 attendees from more than 100 countries that will make up this year’s event. This is Web Summit’s second year of a three-year run in Vancouver, and it’s hoping to bring the crowd size to 40,000 by 2027. Last year’s event drew 16,000 people—four thousand less than this year—and was estimated to have generated $93 million in economic impact.

“A battle is raging for the future of AI.”

Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit

“We meet at a critical moment in the history of technology. A battle is raging for the future of AI. A battle between open-source AI and closed AI,” Web Summit CEO and founder Paddy Cosgrave told the crowd as he stood against the dayglo technicolour of the stage’s lighting. 

“There are speakers you will hear from over the coming days who will tell you US closed AI models will win, and you’ll hear from others who will tell you it’s already over—that free Chinese open-source models have won. There are some who say it’s all still in the balance,” Cosgrave said. “I hope—we hope—that you’ll disagree fiercely with some of those speakers. We also hope that you leave Web Summit with your views on the future challenged and changed.” 

Cosgrave’s remarks illustrated a defining theme across the evening’s events: that Canadian tech, and indeed the world, is at an inflection point for how the future will be shaped. 

Those comments reverberated throughout the evening’s two keynote events. The first, a conversation between Sigrid Jin, the Sionic software engineer who gained international attention for replicating Anthropic’s Claude codebase at the cost of 25 billion tokens, and Axios senior AI reporter Madison Mills, touched on a variety of subjects, including how much Jin spent on those tokens (we still don’t know the exact figure) and what the future of software might look like in a world where traditional copyright law struggles to keep up with the pace of technological change. 

“When it comes to the agentic era, we are now taking a new stage because speed is unpresentably fast and they’re accurate enough that we need to reconsider what kinds of copyright material or doctrine should be rewritten and reconsidered in the first place,” Jin said. 

The irony of a major player like Anthropic having its code plagiarized after using copyrighted materials to train its own models was not lost on Mills, who asked Jin who, in an era of such capability, truly owns proprietary code. 

“I think code itself is becoming more of a public good,” Jin said. “Software is now getting easier to copy … we just try to make sure the focus is not just on the line-by-line code, but on the impact the code can generate in the first place.”

We hope that you’ll disagree fiercely with some of [our] speakers. We also hope that you leave Web Summit with your views on the future challenged and changed.”

Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit

Opening night’s final event featured a panel between Canada’s AI minister, Evan Solomon, and Joelle Pineau, the chief AI officer at Cohere. While Solomon and Pineau spoke at length about the importance of sovereignty from both a nation-building and enterprise perspective, Cohere’s acquisition of Aleph Alpha as a model for collaboration with Europe, and the competitive advantages and blind spots Canada has, conversation again circled back to themes of defining the terms on which a future for AI, tech, and Canadians would be built on and what type of future we want to build. 

“Technology moves at the speed of innovation, but citizens move at the speed of trust. We’ve got to get the trust out,” Solomon said. He noted that Canada has below-average levels of AI adoption compared to its peers in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 

“We should be open about these concerns about sustainability, about water and power usage, job training, and security. These are real and present issues,” he said. “At the end of the day, whatever technology we build, we want it to reinforce the kind of society we want to live in.”

Feature image courtesy Jesser Cole for BetaKit.