How did my first day of Web Summit start? Running around the city looking for a notebook, of course! I had planned to take my laptop for note-taking, but the venue map is huge, and I wasn’t sure about this laptop’s current battery life. In the States, I’d have popped into a CVS or even a supermarket—they all have office sections. But here, like in London, you need a stationer or office supply store for something so ubiquitous at home. So I found a stationer, bought a (graph paper) notebook, and got to the venue only 45 minutes late. But…GRAPH PAPER NOTEBOOK!
This is the largest tech convention I’ve ever attended. It’s spread out over a huge complex: a sports arena for the main stage with four pavilions—separate warehouse-style buildings. The dozen-plus stages were actually corners in the various pavilion buildings with some seating but fully exposed to the convention floor. The constant noise was bearable only because it was a consistent white noise during the talks. Even so, I could feel synapses popping from the constant sensory pressure.
There were plenty of ancillary spaces dedicated to meet-ups, lounges for different levels of attendees, and, of course, the food. Entering the event last night meant walking past a bunch of food trucks: turns out that line runs almost the entire length of the complex! And between each pavilion, more food trucks. Clearly, food trucks are a thing here, too. I had my first bifana—a pork sandwich, not in the Dinic style, though—that was tasty enough to plan on another. I snapped pictures of some more trad-Portuguese food trucks for days two and three.
My schedule went to hell pretty quickly; fast enough trans-pavilion ambulation for back-to-back events would be difficult without the crowds, nearly impossible with them. At the end of the day, I did three events on the same stage—two planned, one not—just because I needed a longer sit-down! The not-in-a-decade rainstorm predicted for tomorrow will mean all those outdoor space attractions will be shut down, and EVERYBODY will be inside. The organizers sent out a warning to be prepared: I was a cub scout, so I have my umbrella and rain hat, but the crush of bodies (in a platonic setting) is something there’s no preparing for.
Old Timey Tweet Reviews
In my film festival days, I’d fire off tweet reviews of movies to give other fest-goers a heads-up on films they might want to catch on a second screening. Sadly–and pragmatically–these events are once and done, but this feels enough like a fest, so here are my highlights from each event I attended:
- The Age Of Multimodality: Insights From The Frontier — At each stage of AI’s evolution, it exhausted its food supply—rules, expert datasets, and now the Internet. Multi-modal agentic will need to learn how to consume real-world audio-video data in a contextual way to evolve to its next level.
- How To Web Summit: Make The Most Of Your Time — After the usual “focus on people and experience” and “resist FOMO” advice, the best idea was have a goal (or three), get that done early, and try to chill for the rest of the day.
- Data Analysts Meeting — Nobody had heard of python or pandas here! OK, I kid. I did run into a guy working at Fidelity who had thankfully never been shipped off to Marlborough, MA like I had.
- Rewriting The Workweek — Least favorite of the bunch because the interviewer made it feel more like an infomercial. Also, the premise that AI summaries and meeting schedules have cured everybody’s bad case of the Mondays? —mmm-kay.
- Escaping Pilot Purgatory: Turning AI Experiments Into Enterprise ROI — Arrived late and didn’t get a seat, so no notes. I remember the speaker (I hope) tongue-in-cheek saying there were no real risks from AI at all. It. Will. Be. Fine.
- From Moore’s Law to More AI: The Next Era Of Silicon — Interviewer format again was the problem because she was so focused on asking the guest about NVIDIA instead of his company. That Blaze laid some kind of imperative programming paradigm overtop with what they’re doing with on-chip AI warrants some investigation.
- Data Is The New Fuel: Powering AI Agents — A real change coming from agentic is breaking the chatbot one-screen model; users are giving and receiving on multiple devices, applications, and cloud platforms. Orchestrating this will require agentic systems that harvest more custom data from user interactions.
- How To Build The Agentic Edge — Small Language Models for inclusion in edge computing systems can’t come fast enough, and so many things mentioned are perilously close to my old idea of The Parrot. It may be time I made that thing a reality.
- Why Soft Skills Are The Hottest Hires In The Age Of AI — Reminded me I created an UpWorks account ages ago and I should probably do something with it. They are, of course, bullish on freelancing, especially for tech-enough people to be dangerous on their own and creative enough to get real work out of AI. AI is good in the middle (execution) but bad at both ends (goal-setting and result-qualifying), so that is where the need for humans won’t be going away anytime soon.