Of all the four keynote speakers that took the stage on the first two days, they all shared their views on the rising prevalence and role of artificial intelligence (AI) in people’s lives.
The Web Summit 2023 was conducted in Lisbon as usual from 13th -16th in the month of November.
Web Summit is the world’s largest tech conference – a massive fest with a jumble of people from all corners of the world, from different backgrounds and industries.
Besides attending talks (there were 1000 speakers to choose from!), we got a great pulse on the tech industry, gained new knowledge and met some incredible people.
We came back to Ghana humble before the rapid changes of our world, lit up by great discussions on tech, and a deeper respect for the work of media we do on a daily basis. Nevertheless, organizers could deliver what is promised every year — a spectacle.
By Web Summit’s estimate, 70,236 attendees from 153 countries thronged to the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal, to catch experts in action across 27 tracks.
Artificial intelligence (AI) took center stage at Web Summit 2023, including at the event’s startup competition, PITCH. About 906 investors participated in the proceedings, which included the presence of 2,608 startups from 93 countries.
Some Web Summit Highlights
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, former U.S. military analyst, Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and Alibaba president Kuo Zhang took the stage to deliver keynotes.
On the other hand, Wales criticized Elon Musk’s handling of a premier social media platform since he took over a year ago. Under Musk, who promised to fork out $1 billion if Wikipedia changed its name to Dickipedia, Wales said that X (formerly Twitter) is “not really a great source of truth” while expressing his happiness that large language models (LLMs) are sourcing training data from Wikipedia.
Wales not having any problem is a refreshing take on training data scraped from platforms such as Twitter that are now seeking financial compensation. That’s probably because of Wikipedia’s business model.
Whittaker, who resigned from Google in 2019 after her role in organizing Google Walkouts a year earlier, harshly criticized Big Tech’s engagement in the development of emerging technology.
“I think my fears are less about the technology itself and more about the fact that it is developed and controlled by a handful of large corporations whose interests are, of course, the interests of the corporation and profit and growth and the pleasing of shareholders; not necessarily the social good,” Whittaker, who also co-founded AI Now Institute, said.
Brazilian AI company Inspira bagged the ‘Final PITCH’ at Web Summit 2023. Co-founded by Henrique Ferreira in March 2021, Inspira could’ve been the runner-up had the audience votes counted (Inspira bagged 27% of the votes, topped by Kinderpedia at 54% and Cognimate at 19%).
However, Inspira emerged as the jury’s winner among 100 competing startups at Web Summit 2023. Inspira has developed an AI-powered legal assistant for day-to-day operations in the legal sector.
“We’ve been seeing huge growth of the legal ecosystem in terms of investment. And, for us, just being here is a dream come true. Lisbon is important. If you think about the business side, it’s a way of entry to another market. If we expand, Lisbon is the shortest flight,” Ferreira said.
Image source: commission.europa.eu & chooseparisregion.org
