Conference poses questions over the AI revolution, Canadian sovereignty, and the rules shaping what comes next.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Open-source, or closed? Green grids, or gas? Job security, or distrust? Who\u2014or what\u2014owns the future?\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s event. This is Web Summit\u2019s second year of a three-year run in Vancouver, and it\u2019s hoping to bring the crowd size to 40,000 by 2027. Last year\u2019s event drew 16,000 people\u2014four thousand less than this year\u2014and was estimated to have generated $93 million in economic impact.<\/p>\n
\u201cA battle is raging for the future of AI.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit<\/p>\n
\u201cWe 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,\u201d Web Summit CEO and founder Paddy Cosgrave told the crowd as he stood against the dayglo technicolour of the stage\u2019s lighting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are speakers you will hear from over the coming days who will tell you US closed AI models will win, and you\u2019ll hear from others who will tell you it\u2019s already over\u2014that free Chinese open-source models have won. There are some who say it\u2019s all still in the balance,\u201d Cosgrave said. \u201cI hope\u2014we hope\u2014that you\u2019ll disagree fiercely with some of those speakers. We also hope that you leave Web Summit with your views on the future challenged and changed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cosgrave\u2019s remarks illustrated a defining theme across the evening\u2019s events: that Canadian tech, and indeed the world, is at an inflection point for how the future will be shaped.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those comments reverberated throughout the evening\u2019s two keynote events. The first, a conversation between Sigrid Jin, the Sionic software engineer who gained international attention for replicating Anthropic\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes to the agentic era, we are now taking a new stage because speed is unpresentably fast and they\u2019re accurate enough that we need to reconsider what kinds of copyright material or doctrine should be rewritten and reconsidered in the first place,\u201d Jin said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think code itself is becoming more of a public good,\u201d Jin said. \u201cSoftware is now getting easier to copy \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
We hope that you\u2019ll disagree fiercely with some of [our] speakers. We also hope that you leave Web Summit with your views on the future challenged and changed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit<\/p>\n