Canada’s marquee tech conference is descending on downtown Toronto this week.
Driving the news: Over 700 speakers and 40,000 attendees—from business leaders and investors to politicians and professional athletes—are flooding the Enercare Centre from around the world to share ideas, (hopefully) ink deals, and catch a Blue Jays game after.
- Speakers include Amazon AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, the “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, Xanadu’s Christian Weedbrook, and Andreessen Horowitz’s Anish Acharya.
Why it matters: Any conference this big is kind of like a Magic 8 ball that predicts the themes that’ll come up at your All Hands meetings over the next year. It’s also a chance to converge with the who’s who of North American business for the second time since 2019.
Here’s what we gathered from day one:
On Canada: Canada’s Minister of Immigration Sean Fraser introduced a new strategy to attract more foreigners to Canada, including a six-month digital nomad visa, a new path to permanent residency for STEM workers, and a stream for 10,000 US H-1B visa holders to come to Canada. "The reality, folks, you've got the ideas, but you need the talent,” he said.
On artificial intelligence: “Any one company that you or I could point to right now could be a huge winner or not,” Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon AWS, said when asked if Amazon had been left behind in the AI race. Amazon is developing its own large language model (LLM) and adding generative AI to Alexa. “We’re about three steps into a 10K race,” he said.
On quantum computing: Xanadu CEO Christian Weedbrook compared the feeling of developing quantum computers today with the first Apple personal computer. “You just know it’s going to be big,” he said. Weedbook’s bet is that quantum computing will characterize this century and has raised $250 million so far to put towards Xanadu’s part in that effort.
Zoom out: Though the City of Toronto’s decision to fund the conference (while broke) has attracted some criticism, Destination Toronto projects the event will bring almost $50 million to the economy. Between all the happy hours and gourmet snacks, we believe it.—SB