AI+ Summit: Tipping points galore
AI is hitting multiple tipping points in its impact on the tech industry, communication, government and human culture — and speakers at Axios' AI+ Summit in New York Wednesday mapped the transformative moment.
1. The software business is the first to feel AI's full force, and we're just beginning to see what happens when companies start using AI tools to accelerate advances in AI itself.
"We're using agents to build agents," May Habib, CEO of Writer, told Axios' Ina Fried.
"We've been saying for a long time that software is eating the world — now AI is eating the software," said Danny Allan, CTO of AI-security firm Snyk.
2. Chatbots are changing how people interact with one another.
Boston Consulting Group managing director Vladimir Lukic said he's now using AI to game out conversations with CEOs in advance of meetings.
When he tells them that he's asked a chatbot what questions the CEO is likely to ask him, the CEO will invariably want to know the prediction — and that ends up being what they talk about.
3. Government isn't likely to moderate AI's risks.
With the Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress largely pulling back from AI regulation, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul sounded an alarm over a provision in the House-approved Trump spending bill that would bar states from passing new AI rules for a decade.
"We have to stop this," she said, "but I'm right now not holding my breath" that Washington will reverse course.
4. Culture makers fear AI will undermine the urge to create.
AI builders used mountains of "publicly available" data assembled from the collected creative works of humankind in order to train their models.
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