(Image generated by ChatGPT5)
The other week, stars, experts, CEOs, founders, journalists, and commentators took to the over 15 different stages of Lisbon’s Web Summit (one of the biggest tech conferences in Europe, at nearly 72,000 attendees) for hours each day, and there was one little acronym that crossed everyone’s lips over and over again. Sometimes multiple times in one sentence. It was the same term that dominated last year’s Summit: AI.
Last year, most mentions of AI felt speculative, even overexaggerated. This year? It was trickier to measure the temperature of Web Summit’s enthusiasm for the techiest of technology breakthroughs. Were people merely muttering “AI” in the hope that they didn’t sound like they were behind the cutting edge? Were executives and founders frantically leaping aboard the latest techno-babble bus, hoping to catch some of the venture capital falling onto the AI mountain like snow? Were people genuinely excited by the tech? Was AI actually driving new, innovative companies that were delivering meaningful products?
As a journalist, you get to slip behind the curtain of these tech conferences and engage in more candid conversations with some of the tech industry’s titans than happen in the polished, spotlit chats that happen on stage. This gave me a perfect opportunity to “feel” what the vibe around AI at Web Summit was.
And if I had to summarize that vibe in one word, I’d choose “unease.” Around all the excitement and hype of the event itself, there was a thin sheen, a thin “AI skin” wrapped around everything. And despite all the founder and investor bluster, it felt like something potentially quite tenuous. It was there even when I was chatting with people who were shipping actual AI-powered products to their customers.
At one lunch, while sipping wine, an anonymous CEO I was speaking to backstage said they felt that all the executives and deep-pocketed money folk nearby were saying “AI” as much as possible just to sound relevant, no matter how much value it added to their company. I suggested that if we drew a circle around where we were sitting, almost no-one in a 100 meter radius would understand much of the fundamental tech that makes generative AI work. The smart, witty, sharp-minded CEO agreed…then admitted they were one of those people.
Meanwhile, Paddy Cosgrave, WebSummit’s CEO and co-founder, mentioned AI during his keynote address to open the show, noting that the audience would “hear from those behind the world's leading AI models on this stage,” but he cautioned, “they're not American. Instead, as of the last few weeks, they are almost all Chinese. Unlike OpenAI or Anthropic, Chinese AI models are open source.” As the audience muttered in response, perhaps stirred up by this fighting talk, he went on, pointing out that China’s models are “free to use. And in the words of Nvidia's CEO just a few days ago, they'll likely win the AI race. This was utterly unimaginable just 12 months ago. But the world is changing so much faster than ever before.”
The AI war was already lost, Paddy was suggesting. So what was the point of all the people at the conference noisily trying to make their American, European, or Middle Eastern companies buzz with AI goodness? Some in the audience may well have wondered.
At her spectacular open-to-all-questions press conference, actress Jameela Jamil (never someone to mince her words) was supposed to be talking about the art of podcasting, but she ended up fielding question after question about AI. “I find the whole thing deeply disturbing,” she admitted, adding,”I thought AI was supposed to take away the boring task so I could make art. I never thought AI was going to make art and leave me to do all of the boring tasks of labor.” AI may have a helpful place in the legal field, medical field, and for administrative tasks, she agreed, but AI should “keep its f**king paws off our art.”
As part of his interview on the main stage in the final hours of the event, actor Joseph Gordon Levitt talked about the weird economics of AI, which he equated to “digital feudalism,” and noted that there’s something even a bit disturbing about the name: “it sounds like there’s this independent entity, this other robot or alien or even god that is intelligent on its own and can make things.” Then he showed he may really be more grounded than the hundreds of entrepreneurs who had been blindly boosting AI all week by adding, “But that’s actually not how this technology works.” The actor in particular worried about the power of big AI and social media platforms, pointing out (to broad audience applause) that you could rely on a system like this, but “it could be taken away from you. The algorithm could change, or the platform could decide they don't like what you're saying. And you really don't have control over your digital self.”
And this is just a sample of what was said on stage and off stage about AI. If you strolled around the event, AI was being mentioned in talks on the health care stage, on the Software as a Service stage, on the media stage. Amble up to one of the tiny booths where new entrepreneurs were promoting their startups, almost no matter which industry they were working in, from education to game design, and odds are you’d spot “AI” somewhere on their promotional posters.
AI was literally everywhere, written on every flyer, uttered by every attendee, embedded into seemingly every product.
So, back to that AI “thin skin” I mentioned. This is a saying usually associated with something that’s easily wounded. Something fragile.
Like…a bubble.
I think the possibility of an “AI bubble” was on everyone’s mind at Web Summit, whether they were overt about it or not. Because everyone has memories of the famous, world-changing “dot com bubble,” which saw an over-hyped, over-extended, under-delivering Internet-centric tech economy peak in March 2000 and then crash in flames, spectacularly, destructively, over the next couple of years.
I wonder if nervousness about another similar disaster was lurking in the minds of everyone at the Lisbon event.
Could all of the exciting, cash-rich shininess around AI disappear in a moment with nothing but a disappointing sound, sinking the fortunes and entrepreneurial hopes of millions of people? Could all of the energy being blown into the AI hype bubble cause it to burst, revealing that all that had been driving the bubble’s growth was hot air huffed out by overexcited VCs and founders? Is it actually a bubble?
I asked many people this, and they all hedged, with variations on the theme of “we’re seeing exciting growth/usage/customer numbers” followed by something like “the tech might evolve rapidly.”
So I’ll leave it to Jameela Jamil to round off this thought:
“I am terribly worried about the people who are in charge of AI. Very few of them that I know of are known philanthropists or people who’ve behaved publicly responsibly. And the only way to change that is either for us all to get involved or for all of us to defund it where we find it concerning.”
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