At Rise of AI 2024, Fabian Westerheide, CEO and Partner at Rise of AI and AI.Fund, opens the eighth edition of the conference with a review of the AI market and a call to action for German and European policy. He reports a hard cap of 300 onsite attendees with an overbooked waiting list and 1,600 livestream viewers from over 50 nations. He describes 2024 as the year of generative AI, with billions in new funding flowing mostly into foundation models even as the broader VC market declined, and names Nvidia and Microsoft as the year's biggest winners. He argues the US-Europe gap is widening and that 95 percent of global users rely on OpenAI, while China quietly built over 100 foundation models in six months. He uses the talk to launch his book on the state of AI, written partly with AI assistance, and lays out policy demands: a digital government, tax reform that favors labor less than investment, incentives for AI adoption, sovereign European foundation models, reinvestment by the super-rich, and AI and coding education starting in kindergarten.
Key takeaways
- Rise of AI 2024 capped onsite attendance at 300 with an overbooked waiting list, plus 1,600 livestream viewers from over 50 nations.
- Westerheide calls 2024 the year of generative AI, with most new funding flowing into foundation models while the wider VC market fell.
- He says the US-Europe AI gap is widening, with 95 percent of global users on OpenAI and China producing over 100 foundation models in six months.
- He launched his book on the state of AI, partly written with ChatGPT, including an AI-generated closing page and glossary.
- He calls for a digital German government, tax reform favoring labor less than investment, sovereign EU foundation models and AI education from kindergarten.
Detailed notes
Opening: an ecosystem eight years in the making
Westerheide welcomes the audience, noting a hard cap of 300 onsite attendees with an overbooked waiting list, and says the conference now draws more policymakers, regional delegations (from Bavaria and elsewhere) and media than in prior years, though still no German TV. He points to the second German AI Months initiative, which has grown from about 70 events last year to 80-90 this year, and says the livestream reaches 1,600 viewers across more than 50 nations, which he reads as evidence that Germany's AI reputation abroad is stronger than domestic self-criticism suggests.
State of the AI market: the year of gen AI
Westerheide calls the past year the year of generative AI, with billions in new funding flowing mostly into foundation models and large language models even as the overall VC market declined. He stresses that AI is more than chatbots and that roughly 90 percent of founders work with AI outside the generative AI spotlight. He names Nvidia and Microsoft, active in foundation-model M&A, as the year's biggest financial winners, and notes growing government investment, citing Italy and Saudi Arabia (around 40 billion) against a handful of billions in Germany. He also notes more AI regulation globally, contrasting China's strict rules and social-credit-based definition of "trustworthy AI" with the EU AI Act, which he says will take effect the following year.
The widening US-China-Europe gap
Westerheide says the US lead over Europe is accelerating rather than closing, describing the gap as growing from "0 to 4" to "0 to 8" in a soccer metaphor. He notes 95 percent of global AI users rely on OpenAI, with almost all major foundation models originating in the US. He says China, though publicly quieter and somewhat politically defocused, produced over 100 foundation models within six months after building in mandatory censorship, compared to about five or six in Europe. He warns that foundation models trained on politically skewed data risk trapping users in ideological bubbles, and proposes a "Western Union for AI" to pool European values, talent and data. He argues Europe's bottleneck is funding and scaling, not talent, since innovation and startups are global.
Ten years of Rise of AI and the new book
Westerheide recaps the conference's evolution from a Singularity meetup, through a roughly 1,000-person, four-stage "mass education" phase until 2019, a pandemic-era virtual period with as few as 20 attendees, and a deliberate post-2022 choice to cap growth around 200-300 attendees and scale by quality rather than size. He announces the public release of his book on the state of AI, written mostly by humans but including an AI-generated glossary and a final page written by ChatGPT from the prompt "you are the voice for all AI." The book's subtitle sits between dystopia and utopia, and includes a chapter on Europe called "Ready Player Germany."
Policy calls to action
Westerheide lists demands for German and European policy: a digital government and administration that becomes the first large purchaser of AI software; state reform and a fairer tax system, noting he pays about 1.5 percent tax on investment income versus up to 60 percent on employment income; tax incentives for companies integrating AI; sovereign European foundation models trained on local language and culture, running on European clouds; reinvestment by the super-rich of earnings above 100 million a year into healthcare, education and technology; and education reform starting in kindergarten, including at least one foreign and one computer language, to prepare roughly 20 million people to work with AI over the next decade. He also cites a Norwegian case where TikTok's server energy demand reportedly constrained munitions production, arguing for energy-efficient, sustainability-focused "industrial AI" as Europe's niche.
Quotes
AI is more than just gen AI, AI is more than just a chatbot.
Fabian Westerheide
We don't want to grow by size, just by quality, every year.
Fabian Westerheide
The innovation itself is global and the talents are global, especially here in Europe we have a lot of good talents, so we don't have a bottleneck of talents, we just have a bottleneck of funding.
Fabian Westerheide
Questions answered in this talk
How many people attended Rise of AI 2024 and its livestream?
According to Fabian Westerheide at Rise of AI 2024, onsite attendance was capped at 300 with an overbooked waiting list, while the livestream drew 1,600 viewers across more than 50 nations.
Where did AI funding go in 2024 according to Fabian Westerheide?
Fabian Westerheide said at Rise of AI 2024 that most new AI funding went into foundation models and generative AI, that Nvidia and Microsoft were the year's biggest financial winners, and that the AI market grew even as the broader VC market declined.
What policy changes does Fabian Westerheide want for AI in Germany?
At Rise of AI 2024, Fabian Westerheide called for a digital government that becomes an early AI software purchaser, tax reform that no longer favors investment income over labor income, sovereign European foundation models, reinvestment by the super-rich, and AI and coding education starting in kindergarten.