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“In BC, we don’t ask whether AI will change the world. We ask: Will it reflect our values when it does?” — *Kris Krüg, BC + AI Ecosystem*
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Alright founders, listen up. As y’all prep your decks for the Web Summit Vancouver stage, here’s the narrative spine you need to carry into those investor chats and global convos: Vancouver is the prototype of what a human-first, grassroots-grown, radically creative AI ecosystem can look like.
Here’s the pitch, stitched from the underground wisdom of BC’s ecosystem documents, the voices in the trenches, and the vibes in Mount Pleasant coffee shops.
Web Summit Vancouver 2025 Survival Guide - Kris Krüg | Generative AI Tools & Techniques
Vancouver’s AI community wasn’t engineered by some master plan. It grew out of necessity, curiosity, and a bunch of late-night conversations that turned into experiments. It's not being driven by billion-dollar rounds or headline-chasing accelerators—it’s being pushed forward by community meetups in warehouse galleries, code shared on Discord, and rough prototypes born in basements and borrowed classrooms.
20 Ways to Resist AI’s Mind Enslavement - Kris Krüg | Generative AI Tools & Techniques
When you go to a Vancouver AI Meetup, what you’ll see isn’t a pitch fest—it’s real people working through hard questions together. How do I integrate open weights into my project without blowing up my ethics? How do I protect my community's data while still building something useful? It’s messy. It’s honest. It’s ours.
And that matters. Because the stuff getting built here isn’t shaped by what VCs want to see next quarter. It’s shaped by what people here need. What they care about. That grounding creates resilience. You feel like you’re part of something, not just building on top of something.
In a city where cinematographers and sound designers rub shoulders with ML engineers and UX researchers, creativity is baked into how we think about AI. We don’t just ask what the model can do. We ask: What should it do? What could it reveal? What stories can it help tell?
At the Metacreation Lab at SFU, researchers are teaching machines to interpret the world through the light and lens of BC. Not just feeding it data, but helping it learn a local way of seeing. That’s not theoretical—that’s tangible. And it’s changing how we think about co-creation.
Or look at VCS prototyping visuals for the Las Vegas Sphere in a snowy Whistler parking lot. They didn’t have months or massive budgets. They had a headset, some gumption, and a local team who knew how to get weird with it.
This is a place where creative constraints don’t hold us back—they generate the best stuff we’ve got.