Web Summit Notebook: China, AI, Trump.
CEO Paddy Cosgrave says, “The entire future is just China. That’s it."
A battalion of Ubers drivers deposited the world’s most prominent tech executives in Lisbon last week. Some 71,500 people, dressed in padded jackets and Stan Smiths, were looking to impress investment firms sitting atop some $14.7 trillion backed VCs and the sandy sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and Oman. Everyone is hoping to be, or to find the next TikTok or OpenAI.
Pharrell and Carmelo Anthony brought the star power and speakers including Microsoft president Brad Smith and the CEO of Manchester United, Omar Berrada spoke on panels about passion and politics, AI and enterprise software. The event is the biggest tech conference in the world and there was so much video sharing that Portugal’s telecom company bragged that it had handled 63 terabytes of mobile traffic during the four day event; a music industry event in the summer generated just eight terabytes by comparison.
Web Summit is extremely well organized for such a complex event, but there is also a wild, anything-can-happen air to the proceedings. Yulia Navalny, the Russian widow of Putin’s political opponent Alexei Navalny, was heckled by activists who interrupted her speech about democracy with air alarms and pro-Ukranian chants of, “Stop the War.” Navalny told them she was anti-Putin but struggled to be heard above the noise. Elsewhere, an attendee suffered a stroke just as he was about to take the stage. Such are the heart aches of the high octane global conference business.
Lisbon is an appropriate setting for those in the business of seeing where the future is taking us. It was once a red hot business center for global exploration and famous son Vasco da Gama set sail in 1497 creating the first sea trading route from Europe to the East. Today, Europe and America are looking at Asia with concern. I asked Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave over eggs and industrial-strength coffee on Friday what he’s thinking about for the next event.
“The entire future is just China. That’s it. There's this weird denialism. I was at quite a few dinners where a lot of CEOs from America just can’t understand. They’re hoping that Trump normalizes relations with China, because America is just so dependent on China. China is not at all dependent on the United States.”
The return of the anti-China Trump Administration has everyone wondering what is next. Cosgrave recalled that the chairman of Huawei, Guo Ping spoke at Web Summit in 2019 prompting threats from the Trump State Department and demands that the White House CTO Michael Kratsios take the stage in a war of words with the Chinese.
Kratsios was just appointed to the Trump transition team. How Trump, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will impact the tech business and progress in AI was on everyone’s minds. Pamela San Martin, a Mexican lawyer who is part of the Oversight Board overseeing META’s operations wants to see elections protected from social media, saying there should be transparency about who and what is boosted.
Ray Kanchan, the CTO of Nagarro, a company that helps firms with digital transitions, told me he is cautiously optimistic. “Somehow I don’t think one person can change the policy of so many countries and technologies just like that. At the same time there are risks. We are all fragile, the supply chain after COVID.” He hoped changed would be fueled by “data and logic,” not ego.
AI Nothing Burger
Meanwhile if you were playing the “AI bingo” drinking game last week, you’d need a liver transplant by now. You couldn't go five feet without hearing someone explain how it's going to revolutionize how we all live.
VC investor, Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl was in a car on the way to the airport and told me, “I heard about AI very differently from Western innovators than Eastern. For Asia and Latin America, AI is about redundancy, reducing costs and removing errors. For the West it’s what can we do that’s super cool and innovative.”
Josh Liss, a former Googler, was at Web Summit to find partners for his new company Dream Flare which taps AI to create entertainment that allows users to create their own endings. “It’s the most powerful technology since writing,” he mused, sharing that AI will shrink the world in the same way the internet did in the late nineties by destroying language barriers.
Not everyone’s on the same page. “AI is a bit overblown. We’re still at the point of how do people use it? I don’t know,” said journalist Ania Lichtarowicz, who runs The Global Tech Podcast. “We have an issue that women are not embracing it, why is that not working? Is it rubbish in, rubbish out?”
The Future of Media
The US election prompted a huge debate on media trust Kanchan said that he’s started asking himself whether what he sees and reads is real. “It’s put a huge question mark on the media's trustworthiness and that’s not good.” He says of the Indian media, “There’s a right wing and a left wing and there’s no trustworthy middle news.”
Getting people paying is the answer according to Lichtarowicz. “Did your parents buy a newspaper every day? They spent a pound to get information that was sourced and checked. If you want it for free then misinformation is going to continue. Journalism has been mocked and has been degraded as unworthy of payment and I’m really angry about this.”
I asked Cosgrave what he’d been hearing from the tech industry about Trump these past few days. He responded, “My first instinct was, will all the billionaires be OK? In particular the ones you know that didn’t fund him? And then I did a little ring around just to make sure everybody was OK. It turns out they’re going to be fine.”
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I’m sorry, this is such a clown-ass thing to say it invalidates everything else he says:
“China is not at all dependent on the United States.”
You mean beyond being majorly dependent on the US market as a trade partner, with who exports have more than quadrupled over two decades?