Bright banners herald the promise of artificial intelligence along the main promenade in Davos, but executives gathered at the World Economic Forum say they are struggling to figure out how to get a return on their investment in the technology.
Several company CEOs gathered at this year’s forum told Reuters that current generative AI technology still has much to prove.
The president of cloud computing security company Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, told Reuters that the next few months could even feel like an “AI disappointment.”
“Everyone thinks, yeah, I can make these cool demos, but where’s the real value?” she said, echoing a common theme among business leaders at the Davos event.
ChatGPT’s rapid growth is, in a sense, an exception. In the first two months of its launch in November 2022, the chatbot reached approximately 100 million users, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in history.
The chatbot has brought so-called generative artificial intelligence to consumers’ fingertips, allowing people to write whatever they want into a search field and get a poem, a school essay, or gather information on various topics. The product has also been shown to positively contribute to the development of ideas in “low-risk, non-business-critical use cases,” said Victor Riparbelli, CEO of AI video generation startup Synthesia.
But “enterprise applications are definitely not ready” for this chat-based AI, the executive said.
One of the problems cited by Riparbelli is that there is no clear path to ending so-called “hallucinations,” or AI-generated misinformation content. While computer scientists have developed ways to narrow down where chatbots can extract answers, business leaders may not want to take that risk.
Other concerns, said Ana Paula Assis, IBM’s president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, are preventing the chatbot’s AI from reproducing human biases.
“Customers are still very concerned about how to bring these solutions within the confines of regulations and compliance,” he said.
Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang said in Davos that artificial intelligence must serve the common good but must be properly governed as it “presents risks to security and our ethics” and Chinese President Xi Jinping wants the United Nations to play a role central to discussions on artificial intelligence, UN. Secretary General António Guterres said this on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, according to survey results published by consultancy BCG, around 90% of a sample of 1,400 senior executives said they expect generative AI to take a step forward from its recent popularity or is leading only limited experiments and pilot projects.
But big tech companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon.com, have pressed ahead, inviting thousands of companies to try new AI systems.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a company event in Davos on Wednesday that artificial intelligence is poised to increase productivity and potentially accelerate science itself.
However, corporate revenues and profits from recent efforts are still unclear.
“BE REALISTIC ABOUT AI”
While a sign in Davos urged people to “get real about AI,” efforts to find a market for it have led developers to consider a variety of places.
Cohere, a top-tier AI startup focused on enterprises, sees helping sellers as a path to revenue.
“The idea is that it’s on the sales side and that it makes sales teams more productive,” Cohere Chief Executive Aidan Gomez told Reuters. The hope would be to “help them make more contacts, more follow-ups and automate a lot of this process.”
On the other hand, medicine is more complicated. While speeding up note-taking for doctors is a task worthy of AI, automating the medical profession is not, as doing so could put lives at risk, Gomez said.
“We should be focused on helping humans, not replacing doctors and having a chatbot doctor,” Gomez said.
Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan said the drug company is working with Microsoft to more widely deploy artificial intelligence to provide samples to staff who submit 20,000 to 30,000 responses to regulators’ questions a year . The “next opportunity,” he said at the Microsoft event, would be artificial intelligence for drug design.
Tejpreet Chopra, chief executive of BLP Group, a large wind and solar energy operator in India, told Reuters that the company is ready to incorporate AI chat technology, “but only for internal use, to write good English, not for the contents”.
ELECTIONS
Elections are a high-risk area for AI companies as voters around the world go to the polls in 2024.
Regarding the use of AI in disinformation campaigns, Gomez said Cohere’s policies prohibit impersonation, while Riparbelli said Synthesia does not allow clients to create political content through its AI video platform.
OpenAI, which also prohibits abusive impersonation through its technology, said Monday that it is working with the National Association of U.S. Secretaries of State and will begin directing users to CanIVote.org for election-related questions.
Understanding how content is created is a major concern for companies and policymakers, said Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
“If (people) see a video or an image, they should be able to tell whether it was generated by artificial intelligence or by humans,” Prabhakar told Reuters.
For Srini Pallia, an executive at technology services and consultancy firm Wipro, the AI buzz at Davos is loud and clear, filling the void left by cryptocurrencies.
“It’s AI, AI, and more AI,” Pallia said.
Source: Terra
Rose James is a Gossipify movie and series reviewer known for her in-depth analysis and unique perspective on the latest releases. With a background in film studies, she provides engaging and informative reviews, and keeps readers up to date with industry trends and emerging talents.
