🔆 Lumiera's Paris observations

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🗞️ Issue 78 // ⏱️ Read Time: 5 min

Hello 👋

We’re spending this week in Paris, where we are attending RAISE Summit and hosting an Executive Dinner together with Windsurf, a leading AI code assistant company. Below we are sharing some of our insights based on the conference.

For context: This conference stands out in a couple of ways in contrast to other events we’ve attended, in that there has been a heavy focus on the infrastructural side of AI, and it clearly has a strong commercial purpose, with few other interests being represented. Most participants are business representatives with a clear economic interest in AI infrastructure.

We’re highlighting three things today: The infrastructure discussions, the human element of technological innovation, and some exclusive details from our event.

Our Three Observations from this Week

1. The infrastructure discussions

What does it take to fuel AI? Data centres (physical spaces), the processing units/GPU’s (the hardware chips that these models run on, stored in the data centers) and the foundation models that infrastructure serves.

Based on the conversations we’ve taken part of, it seems like the majority of AI infrastructure leaders are making a strong effort to win the race against each other, focusing on market domination, rather than considering the impact on society and the experience of end users. There is a degree of separation here, between providing the backbone of AI to model companies and the final use case, that allows for this narrow scope of what it means to “win.”