The glass-paned convention centre in downtown Vancouver gives Web Summit’s 15,000 attendees a floor-to-ceiling view of the city’s crystal waters and snow-capped peaks. But Vancouver’s panoramic vistas are not what compelled the organizers to host one of North America’s largest technology conferences here.

“Vancouver’s more than just the views,” the city’s mayor Ken Sim said at the event’s opening ceremony, which kicked off on Tuesday night. “We have one of the fastest growing tech pipelines in North America.”

Web Summit, a Dublin-headquartered events company, hosts major conferences in Brazil, Qatar, Hong Kong and Portugal. It announced last June that Collision, its North America conference, would move to Vancouver from Toronto, where it had been held since 2019, rebrand as Web Summit, and remain there until at least 2027. 

When Collision relocated from New Orleans to Toronto in 2019, it received around $6.5 million annually from the city and its partners, BetaKit reported in 2023. 

Mayor Sim, who was a major proponent of bringing the conference to Vancouver, touted the $40 billion in investment tech companies in the city have attracted in the past five years. He singled out homegrown startups Clio, Sanctuary AI and Accelleron as “local leaders.”

B.C. Minister of Finance Brenda Bailey, and the Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation also led the push, Web Summit chief executive Paddy Cosgrave said on stage.

The conference is expected to bring in $172 million in direct revenue for the city this year, and have a $279 million economic impact on B.C. for the next three years, according to estimates from Destination Vancouver. This year’s event will be the biggest startup gathering for the first year of any Web Summit event, spokesperson Katherine Farrell said in an emailed statement.

All three levels of government jointly put $14.8 million toward Web Summit’s conference, while British Columbia’s provincial government contributed $6.6 million. 

The conference, held against a backdrop of an ongoing U.S.-led trade war, has attracted hundreds of startups from the U.S., Cosgrave added. “There are lots of startups, lots of entrepreneurs who are just plowing on irrespective of anything else going on in the world. So you’re incredibly welcome,” he said.

A bold start: Much like the conference’s unclouded views of the Pacific, it opened with an unfiltered take on the state of AI by leading scientist Gary Marcus. 

Marcus has written numerous books about artificial intelligence, including The Algebraic Mind in 2001, which highlighted how AI is vulnerable to hallucinations due to its lack of standard database records. 

“I didn’t expect anything that I wrote in 2001 would still be true in 2025 and I think it’s actually depressing how little progress we’ve made,” Marcus said in a fireside chat, adding that AI does mimicry well, but cannot reason. It’s the “stupidity” of AI that makes it dangerous, he argued. The current issues stem from AI not being able to differentiate when it shouldn’t be sharing certain information—like how to create biological weapons.

He followed his cautionary note with the observation that the industry is realizing “diminishing returns,” adding that people have a fear of missing out on the moment when AGI does happen. 

“It is the interest of every investor to keep this myth [of AGI] alive,” Marcus said, noting ways they can get rich before a technology delivers on any promises. “They’re not going to be here when it all falls apart.” This is why there is so much hype, he argued, likening AI to snake oil, pet rocks and Furbys.

Bluer skies ahead: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber struck a more optimistic tone on how social media alternatives could shape its future. The 25-employee U.S.-based social media company initially began as an experiment within Twitter to build a decentralized social network. Over the last year, it has exploded in popularity and attracted 35 million users.

“You get to have the choice to lead with your identity and your data,” Graber said, pointing to custom feeds letting users control what timeline and content they see. The social media platform is rolling out open-source tools for users who don’t code to moderate their own content, she said.

As for AI, she said that Bluesky wasn’t going to be able to lead the charge and put guardrails in place by itself, but it’s something that people “will eventually arrive at collectively as society.” 

“It’s a new technology with a lot of good and bad that comes with it, and it’s a double-edged sword, and you have to learn how to use it if you’re going to stay on top of history and not get left behind,” Graber said.