True to its namesake, Web Summit’s Vancouver debut featured dubstep, a lightshow, and the global technology conference’s signature wall of cubes. But unlike past editions of its predecessor, Collision, which could fall prey to strong vibes and soft questions, opening night in Vancouver was largely a collection of substantive conversations about the current state of tech.
Following some opening remarks from Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrave and local leaders, New York University professor emeritus Gary Marcus and Bluesky CEO Jay Graber took the stage for back-to-back discussions about the limitations of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential of decentralized social media.
“People often say, ‘Gary used to think AI is stupid, now he thinks it’s dangerous.’”
Gary Marcus
Despite headlining a conversation about the moral and technical inadequacies of AI, Marcus—an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, AI entrepreneur, and author—said that he does not see himself as a critic of the tech. He emphasized that he wants AI to succeed, but noted that generative AI overshadows the fuller spectrum of the technology’s potential.
“I think it’s the wrong avenue,” he said.
When asked about generative AI’s tendency to hallucinate, Marcus argued that the tech is fundamentally predicated on prediction and incapable of reasoning. He added that he finds it “depressing how little progress” has been made on reducing the propensity of large language models (LLMs) to hallucinate, and asserted that the notion the problem could be solved by ingesting more data has been proven false.
“[LLMs are] auto-complete on steroids, and that gives the illusion of intelligence, but it’s really just an illusion,” Marcus said. “So it works some of the time and not others. The same process drives a hallucination as a correct answer.”
RELATED: Half of the internet is bots and they’re feeding you lies
Marcus noted that the feigned intelligence of generative AI produces many downstream risks, such as misinformation at scale and cybercrime. But the real danger, he said, comes from “giving a person or machine a power that it shouldn’t have”—a thinly-veiled reference to US President Donald Trump that elicited laughs from around the room.
“People often say, ‘Gary used to think AI is stupid, now he thinks it’s dangerous,’” Marcus said. “But some of the danger actually comes from the stupidity. The current AI can easily be abused.”
Marcus did note that there are some domains where the tech can be useful because the cost of hallucinations is not that high, citing programming (and its inherent expectation of debugging) as one example. He also acknowledged that LLMs are “not going anywhere” because the frenzy of interest in AI has produced enough competition to keep prices low.
But while Nvidia is one company that has profited by “selling shovels in the gold rush,” most have yet to realize revenues anywhere close to their capital expenditures. Marcus cited a recent study that surveyed 7,000 workplaces to determine if AI impacted their bottom line and found there was “no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation.”
“It was sold as this universal thing, like snake oil, that was going to solve absolutely everything, and it’s not,” he said. “And people are wising up.”
Building the “lobby to the open social web”
While Marcus offered plenty of pointed criticisms of AI but few alternatives, Graber shared her vision for how decentralized social media could help build a more open and user-friendly web than her competitors.
Graber leads Bluesky, the fast-growing US-based decentralized social network that was initially incubated within Twitter and has ballooned to 35 million users since its launch in 2023, despite the company having just 25 employees.
Bluesky has risen to prominence at a time when the user experience on many of its competitors’ platforms has degraded, thanks at least in part to optimizing for user engagement metrics to fuel advertising.
RELATED: The BetaKit Guide to Web Summit Vancouver
As a CEO in an industry dominated by firms that have taken different, more closed-ecosystem approaches, Graber said Bluesky has been built on the idea that users deserve control over their experience. That control extends to the ability for users to port their identity to other platforms, build new tools and content moderation features, and keep the relationships they have with their audience.
As a decentralized platform, Graber noted that Bluesky created “constraints for ourselves from the beginning” that prevent it from falling prey to the same pressures as other social media platforms. Bluesky intends to monetize its network with the help of subscriptions and by eventually building a marketplace around what is being developed on its platform. She added that if Bluesky fails to deliver on certain solutions and experiences, there will be alternatives available to its user base.
“Bluesky is not the end goal. It’s the start.”
Jay Graber, Bluesky
“Bluesky is not the end goal,” Graber said. “It’s the start. We built an open-source app that’s the lobby to the social internet, and hopefully, there will be many other applications and users will be able to move between them.”
Noting that “we’re at sort of an inflection point” with social media and the web, Graber said she is acutely conscious of the societal impact a platform like Bluesky could have.
“When you build something that critical—it’s really a communication infrastructure for society—you need to stay focused on, how is it affecting society?”
Graber believes humility is an important part of the equation, noting that it “keeps open the possibility that you know we’re wrong in the choices we make, and if we are, we want to make sure that someone else can get it right.”
With files from Douglas Soltys.
Feature image courtesy Sam Barnes/Web Summit via Flickr.