--- title: "That’s the Wave" subtitle: "What I've learnt from brilliant minds at the flagship tech event in Turin, one year later" author: "Lorenzo Ancona" date: 2026-10-10 language: en words: 1461 canonical: https://artifactstech.substack.com/p/thats-the-wave license: CC BY 4.0 cite_as: "That’s the Wave by Lorenzo Ancona, Artifacts, 2026-10-10. https://artifactstech.substack.com/p/thats-the-wave (CC BY 4.0)" --- # That’s the Wave For the second year in a row, Artifacts attended the Italian Tech Week in Turin, now renamed ***Wave***. [![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T4QW!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0470a698-aa4d-4e0d-88d3-e3a1722d8ecd_1440x811.webp)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!T4QW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0470a698-aa4d-4e0d-88d3-e3a1722d8ecd_1440x811.webp) The event is run by [Vento](https://vento.ventures/), the venture platform backed by Exor. Vento was set up to help Italian founders build from Italy, and combines a venture fund, a programme for early-stage teams, and the Turin event itself. Last year, the takeaway was that AI is becoming basic infrastructure, like electricity or the cloud. This year, nobody needed to make that case anymore but rather discuss what the applications are, **how AI is making us rethinking** ***how*** **we work and** ***what*** **we work on, and how to not fell behind.** The answers I heard kept coming back to things you can touch or see: a steering wheel, a delivery network, a data center, a room full of people. And, as usual, to Europe and whether it can own any of it. Here’s what stuck with me. > **Design you understand with your fingers** [![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!D749!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b264b7d-996f-4388-87f3-b3313b386026_1536x2048.jpeg)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!D749!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b264b7d-996f-4388-87f3-b3313b386026_1536x2048.jpeg) The most interface-heavy talk of the week was about a car. **Jony Ive and John Elkann** discussed the Ferrari Luce, the electric Ferrari designed with LoveFrom. Its displays are analogue meters behind real lenses, and its controls are physical. **Ive’s point was that a physical control does two things: you can use it without looking, and it gives you feedback.** General-purpose touchscreens save on hardware, but they disconnect us as physical beings from the objects we use. When the car was unveiled, the reaction was brutal (Ferrari’s share price fell 8.7% that day). Ive’s answer was that designers shouldn’t hide behind “it’s just new”. *You can make something new and different that’s rubbish. The hard part is making something whose newness comes from it being better.* > **Agents will need the physical world** Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash, made a counterintuitive claim: **the more AI agents there are, the higher the demand for physical networks and even human labour.** Agents want to be useful, and most useful things in daily life (eating, shopping, returning something) are physical. DoorDash is already running autonomous delivery vehicles in Phoenix, and Xu said building them is **like building three to five companies at once:** software, hardware, permitting and operations. In the end, customers don’t care about the technology but just want what they ordered. > **Anyone can build, so who’s accountable?** Michele Catasta of Replit explained why coding was the first domain AI cracked: **code is verifiable, so you can test whether it works and train models with little human supervision.** He also argued that code is now a universal tool for getting work done, often written to be run once and thrown away. **One example:** during a wildfire in Canada, a resident built a website in about an hour to coordinate rides and help between neighbours. But his biggest worry was **cybersecurity**, which he called a *today* problem, not a long-term one. Agents now act across every system in a company, and we have no equivalent of an HR function for them. [![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FESd!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb60896ef-2c7c-486a-967e-929efd72a946_768x1024.jpeg)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FESd!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb60896ef-2c7c-486a-967e-929efd72a946_768x1024.jpeg) Tim Berners-Lee and Rosemary Leith made a similar point from the other end. Their [Contract for the Web](https://contractfortheweb.org/) (2019) set principles for governments, companies and citizens. Leith suggested we need the same for AI, starting with something basic: **agents with a licence plate**, so you know where they come from and who is responsible for them. > **Open weights and the politics around them** Leith noted that a **majority of people using AI already rely on open-source models**, most of them Chinese, mainly because they’re 5 to 20 times cheaper. Anish Acharya (a16z) saw recent open-weight releases from Mistral and others as proof that open models can come from outside the US and China. Sebastian Mallaby, author of a new book on Demis Hassabis, was more sceptical. He placed open-weight advocates in the camp that is “in denial” about AI’s risks, predicted a mid-sized disaster (a Chernobyl, not an apocalypse) **would eventually force regulation**, and dismissed the claim that safety-focused labs are after regulatory capture as “nonsense”. His bottom line on governance: Europe will follow whatever the US decides, so the only conversation that really matters is between Washington and Beijing. > **Europe’s fragmentation as training** Like last year, **being European was framed as an advantage, not a handicap.** Acharya argued the best European companies embrace fragmentation (economic, regulatory, cultural) rather than pretending Europe is one market like the US. He also suggested AI makes **micro-markets** viable: if building software costs less, a company serving only Switzerland can still be huge. Max Junestrand of Legora pushed back on another European reflex: sovereignty matters for energy, defence and compute, but in enterprise software it’s “an excuse for companies not bold enough to compete globally”. > **Proof from elsewhere** A panel with founders of ICEYE (Finland), Ajax Systems (Ukraine) and Bending Spoons, moderated by Linda Rottenberg of Endeavor, was about **founders who were told to move to Silicon Valley and ignored the advice.** Their main argument was talent: less competition for great engineers, and many who left now want to come home. Luca Ferrari of Bending Spoons used the four-minute mile as an analogy: **once someone does it, others follow.** Successful companies with roots in Italy make the next ones more likely. > **The money is there, it ‘just’ doesn’t move** Dealroom and Atomico brought the numbers. **European VC is running at about \$89 billion a year, there are 56 VC-backed companies worth more than \$10 billion**, and exits this year have already passed previous years combined. But: - European pension funds and insurers sit on roughly €15 trillion, and only about €15 billion has gone into venture over a decade. Allocating just 1% of pension capital to VC would increase scale-up capital by 50%. [![Article content](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!b6bY!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda7b66da-27c5-431e-8eba-1fa31f73f362_1120x672.png "Article content")](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!b6bY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fda7b66da-27c5-431e-8eba-1fa31f73f362_1120x672.png) - At later stages, the **most successful startups are mostly owned by non-European investors**, so the gains leak abroad. - 42% of European unicorn founders built their company in the US. - **Public procurement is worth around €2 trillion a year**, and very little of it reaches European startups. Defence is the exception, and there startups have delivered. Capital alone won’t fix it, though. The cost of restructuring a company in places like Italy, Spain and France correlates with fewer unicorns per capita. EU Inc, the push for a single European company structure, was framed as a test of whether policymakers are willing to do the hard things. > **Leading at AI speed** Nik Storonsky of Revolut runs the company with around 50 direct reports so he can step in at any level, like a conductor who can play every instrument. **He said AI is forcing him to rethink every system he had built around people’s strengths and weaknesses.** Revolut is opening its infrastructure to third-party agents through MCPs rather than keeping it closed, and is training its own models on transaction data. Max Junestrand described Legora going from 200 to 1,500 people in a year. When work that took ten hours takes one, lawyers billing by the hour have to change their business model, and then their whole organisation. [Leave a comment](https://artifactstech.substack.com/p/thats-the-wave/comments) > ### **Save for Later** Writing, and who does it. The Goncourt [dropped Thélyson Orélien’s novel](https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2026/09/25/affaire-thelyson-orelien-si-les-ia-ecrivent-de-plus-en-plus-comme-des-humains-les-humains-ecrivent-ils-de-plus-en-plus-comme-des-ia_6782630_3232.html) on a detector’s word. Are humans now writing like AI? Menand on [the power of punctuation](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/09/28/on-the-mark-louis-menand-book-review) (Austen loved dashes, so does Claude). And arXiv [caps submissions at two a month](https://lnkd.in/p/eZjPM-pg) after 40,363 in September. Btw, Karpathy suggests you [ask LLMs for explainer videos](https://x.com/karpathy/status/2105819303471976479) instead of text and airplane security syntax. Handy for Cornell’s [report on the future of the university](https://provost.cornell.edu/_files/initiatives/future-of-the-american-university-full-report.pdf). Agents, closer. Meta’s [Muse](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/technology/meta-muse-ai-agent.html) now cancels your duplicate subscriptions. Eric Schmidt says [interfaces will go away](https://x.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/2101524067715256368). The OII asks if [governments are ready for agents](https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/are-governments-ready-for-ai-agents/). And Tavus claims [48% thought its avatar was human](https://x.com/tavus/status/2105704169009246248). On sovereignty: Aleph Alpha’s [Kolibri](https://lnkd.in/p/eGxvcDtx), a German model that says “I don’t know” when it doesn’t. Not bad :) China [bets its economy on AI](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/world/asia/china-ai-economy-xi-jinping.html), [Governments falling behind vs AI](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/technology/ai-government-regulation.html), and the FT on [an AI maths breakthrough](https://www.ft.com/content/f9d5e0af-0106-4909-a854-7bd69cbb74ab). > ### **The Bookshelf** [![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RF3W!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F66dae9dc-5194-4900-b1dc-52d784d71e07_1080x1080.png)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RF3W!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F66dae9dc-5194-4900-b1dc-52d784d71e07_1080x1080.png) As AI enters more and more every domain, ***“The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI”*** is a good one to grasp how to be on top of it in daily tasks and, ultimately, keep understanding what’s doing for us 📚 **All the books** I’ve read and recommended in Artifacts are [here.](https://airtable.com/appK7fMPX1DMkQYzL/shrRh8TgI7GtmgBxM) > ### **Nerding** [![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nrjK!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9ff730c-2e5e-4bee-bde0-d3b0f1c0d1bd_1080x1080.png)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nrjK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9ff730c-2e5e-4bee-bde0-d3b0f1c0d1bd_1080x1080.png) Maybe you’ve seen people whispering to their laptop recently to turn their voices in commands for AI. It can be free, open source, and running on your own laptop with [Parrot](https://tryparrot.app/)! **NEW:** All the tools suggested in Nerding have been collected [here](https://airtable.com/appM6aktg3WF5m3Ve/shr2PeJvTe1dukYjZ)! ⚙️ > ### **☕?** If you want to know more about Artifacts, where it all started, or just want to connect... [Let's grab a virtual coffee ☕](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/appointments/schedules/AcZssZ2ibxlzyU7rgnuoTgqXb_DFc19dfHmJeu1OAu17IY0_oHrtcJtvtctAJnMabirgZNx5Z5NAPGs0)