E-AI, or Entertain AI, is an event that takes place again in 2025 at the Montreal Congress Center on February 26 and 27.
E-AI aims to bring together artificial intelligence (AI) professionals and allow them to attend a wide range of conferences, as well as network. And it’s mission accomplished for this year because the number of expected participants exceeded the expectations of the organization, which finally had to welcome everyone on the third floor of the Congress Center instead of the flashing rooms of Oasis Immersion on the first floor initially planned.
The conferences were divided into three rooms with busy programs.
Our friends from SYNTHÈSE and CDRIN also had the third room dedicated to their guests and conferences.
While I naturally couldn’t attend all the lectures that took place in all the rooms constantly, here are some of my observations:
There were speakers, speakers very inspired by AI, by automatically generated ideas or inspired by lower production costs to produce what they want. Others were naturally less optimistic, more cautious.
We were treated to many speeches on creativity, including how to be more creative on a daily basis, or how AI makes them more creative.
Some speakers were downright arrogant, thinking they had a miracle solution to do their job: “If we can produce it without you, why do we need you?”, then boasting about the savings produced by layoffs.
There were the whistleblowers, who warned that more than 600 billion US dollars are currently being invested globally in AI, while ChatGPT “just” brings in 3 billion US dollars and it is therefore not necessarily something profitable.
Le Dr. Yves Jacquier, an AI specialist at Ubisoft Montreal, who is really the only one to have warned about the real impact of using AI on our natural resources. Indeed, all the queries that are made using generative AI launch calculations on remote computers, located in data centers. These data centers are always more and more massive, and computers require more and more cooling. We cool the computers with water. And so billions of liters of water are used for computers, at a time when certain regions are increasingly lacking and droughts are occurring more and more often.
He also advocates a sustainable model for the use of AI in companies, with as many tools, computers and computing power in-house as possible, being careful not to send Ubisoft’s confidential data to external generative AI servers.
Since the ChatGPT boom, it has been a gold rush for many companies and startups. Everyone hopes to find the winning formula to save or pocket millions of dollars.
Startups are all going for their ChatGPT wrapper, i.e. an application that uses ChatGPT in the background while offering additional functions or utilities.
Ethical issues regarding the theft of artists’ data were also mentioned, sometimes suggesting the use of ethical generative AI engines, or those that had no solution.
The E-AI event was very well organized, everything was smooth. I was able to meet many new people and meet acquaintances. Everyone was happy to share their projects. If I allow me to comment on the substance of the speeches, it is because the form was well executed.
Thank you to the E-AI team for the organization and the invitation.
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