If you’re already tired of the AI hype, you might want to turn up the volume on your earbuds. Judging by all the grand pronouncements and corridor chatter about AI at Europe’s splashiest tech events last week, we ain’t heard nothing yet.
Try this: “Over the next 5 to 10 years these [AI] tools will superpower people. They will be 10x or 100x more productive than they are today.
“But this will be fairly mundane compared with what is coming. I think it is totally underestimated how these full AGI systems will change the world. It is going to change everything.”
That was the take of one leading AI expert at Founders Forum (held under the Chatham House Rule) this week. Many of the biggest names in European tech turned out to celebrate Founders Forum’s 20th birthday party, including Spotify’s Daniel Ek, Google DeepMind’s Sir Demis Hassabis and Arm’s Rene Haas as well as Sarah Friar from OpenAI and Aravind Srinivas from Perplexity. The forum certainly provided an invigorating shot of optimism compared with some of the gloom that has been enveloping Britain in recent weeks.
Many of the 450 entrepreneurs in attendance were buzzing with the possibilities of deploying AI agents to all manner of business functions, envisaging the day when we would all have clusters of AI scientists at our beck and call (assuming they behaved). Every industry would be transformed as the universe of software bits increasingly fuses with that of hardware atoms. “There is tremendous opportunity in Europe to apply AI in life sciences, robotics and automotive companies, as well as gaming,” Peter Sarlin, cofounder of the Finnish AI lab Silo AI, told me.
But the tech leader who stole most of the headlines in Europe this week — and cast some shade on Britain — was a visitor from the US: Nvidia’s ever-present, leather-jacketed Jensen Huang. In London on Monday, Huang hailed Britain as having “one of the richest AI communities anywhere on the planet” but suggested it might not amount to much unless Britain built more data centres (and bought more Nvidia chips). “You can’t do machine learning without machines,” he said.
That message certainly appeared to have hit home with one British tech boss at Founders Forum. Asked what one thing could most help Britain’s tech ecosystem, he replied: “Blow up the UK’s planning rules for data centres.”
After hopping across the Channel to attend VivaTech in Paris, Huang had a different message to convey. He celebrated his company’s partnership with French LLM maker Mistral and announced plans to build 20 data centres and five gigafactories dedicated to AI. “Your AI shortage, your GPU shortage, will be resolved for you soon,” Huang said. Many of the attendees welcomed the boost to the region’s digital infrastructure, even if they questioned how it squared with Europe’s ambitions to assert its own technological sovereignty.
However, back at Founders Forum some industry leaders questioned whether we were not overbuilding big data centres considering that AI is increasingly moving to the edge and being deployed on our personal devices. Expect to hear a lot more this year about contextual AI, as our devices respond to a user’s surroundings and location. That certainly appears to be the thinking behind OpenAI’s $6.4bn acquisition of Sir Jonny Ive’s hardware startup io, described by one attendee as the “biggest acqui-hire in history.”
In this view, contextual AI will live locally on a device, whether it is a smartwatch, or glasses, or a smartphone (or some other Ive-inspired wonder box), bringing about another “revolutionary change” in technology. “We are moving from a push mechanism to a pull function,” in the words of one tech industry executive.
The excitement of founders last week was only matched by the bafflement of some VC investors. With AI applications proliferating so fast and the technology morphing so quickly, many VCs have been left fretting about the sustainability of their existing portfolio companies and scrambling to figure out where next to place their bets. “The moment you have a hypothesis, it’s outdated,” said VC investor Rob Lacher on this week’s Sifted Podcast. Maybe contextual AI will help.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/the-world-is-still-crazy-about-ai/
