TechnologyCantillon

Time to stop the doublespeak on artificial intelligence

Profit is and will remain the driving force; the challenge is to set and enforce credible limits

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman's actions recently have served more clearly than anything else to highlight contradictions at the heart of AI. Photograph: Getty Images

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Cantillon
Tue Jan 23 2024 - 05:00

We might be in awe of artificial intelligence’s potential or dread the changes it will inevitably bring but, as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s courting of Sam Altman at Davos showed, the one thing we cannot do is ignore it.

Altman was, by common consent, the golden guest for all the great and the good hosting gatherings last week in the Swiss mountaintop village. But Altman’s actions in recent times have served more clearly than anything else to highlight the contradictions at the heart of artificial intelligence (AI).

His brief removal from OpenAI arose from fundamental differences over how fast to push the technology and to what end; should it be driven by altruistic motives or profit?

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The answer, unsurprisingly perhaps, was resounding. Those invested in the technology are determined to push it as fast and as far as they can, all the while trying to reassure those more sceptical that they are — or can ever be — in full control of its potential.

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Be in no doubt though: profit will continue to drive the pursuit of AI, with its promise of massive productivity gains.

The “Magnificent Seven” — Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet and Tesla — report results this week with investors betting that the stocks which drove most of the gains in the benchmark S&P500 index last year will start to show a return on their AI investments.

Meanwhile, at Standard Chartered, which employs more than 80,000 people globally, many jobs now belong to one of two categories: “sunrise” roles, such as computing or cloud management, where demand is expected to increase over the next five years or “sunset” jobs, often those vulnerable to automation, which are set to decline.

It seems clear that AI, with its potential to deliver uncannily humanlike text, images and code in seconds, will change our world utterly over the coming generation. Inevitably there will be losers. Who they are, how many, how they are supported and what degree of control we retain over the technology depends on regulators getting frameworks together more quickly than they ever have before. — Additional reporting: The Financial Times Limited 2024

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