[LINK] WEF's AI Autumn

[Roger Clarke]

 > executives at the World Economic Forum (WEF) say they are grappling 
with how to turn early demos into money-makers

 > the months ahead may even feel like an "AI letdown".  "Everyone's 
like, yeah, I can build these cool demos, but where's the real value?"

 > ... there is no clear path to end so-called "hallucinations," or 
false content generated by AI.

 > Other concerns ... are stopping chatbot AI from reproducing human biases

 > We should be focused on assisting humans, not replacing doctors and 
having a chatbot doctor ...


AI buzzes Davos, but CEOs wrestle with how to make it pay
Turning early demos into money-makers.
Jeffrey Dastin
itNews
Jan 18 2024 6:49AM
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/ai-buzzes-davos-but-ceos-wrestle-with-how-to-make-it-pay-604155

Bright banners tout the promise of artificial intelligence along the 
main promenade of Davos, but executives at the World Economic Forum 
(WEF) say they are grappling with how to turn early demos into money-makers.

AI buzzes Davos, but CEOs wrestle with how to make it pay
The arrival of OpenAI's viral ChatGPT triggered a frenzy of venture 
investment and an abrupt change of course inside the world's biggest 
technology companies since late 2022.

This year, several CEOs at the WEF meeting in Davos told Reuters that 
the latest generative AI still has a lot to prove.

Cloud and internet security company Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told 
Reuters that the months ahead may even feel like an "AI letdown".

"Everyone's like, yeah, I can build these cool demos, but where's the 
real value?" he said, echoing a theme among business leaders attending 
the WEF meeting.

ChatGPT's rapid rise is in some ways an outlier.

In the first two months since its November 2022 launch, the chatbot 
reached an estimated 100 million users, making it one of the fastest 
growing applications in history.

The program brought so-called generative AI to consumers' fingertips, 
letting people write a short prompt and generate a poem, school essay or 
gather information as if with a search engine.

It also proved a good collaborator for developing ideas in "low stakes, 
not business-critical use cases," said Victor Riparbelli, CEO of AI 
video generation startup Synthesia.

But "the enterprise is definitely not really ready" for this chat-based 
AI, he said in an interview.

One problem Riparbelli cited is there is no clear path to end so-called 
"hallucinations," or false content generated by AI.

While computer scientists have developed methods for constraining places 
from which chatbots can draw responses, business leaders may not want 
the risk.

Other concerns, said IBM's Europe, Middle East & Africa Chair Ana Paula 
Assis, are stopping chatbot AI from reproducing human biases, and 
regulation.

"Clients are still very worried about how they bring those solutions 
within the boundaries of regulations and compliance," she said.

Premier Li Qiang of China said in Davos that AI has to serve the common 
good but must be appropriately governed, because it "poses risks to 
security and to our ethics." And China's President Xi Jinping wants the 
United Nations to play a central role in AI discussions, UN 
secretary-general António Guterres said.

Meanwhile, some 90 percent of 1400 C-suite executives said they were 
waiting for generative AI to take a step beyond recent hype or were 
doing only limited experimentation and pilots, survey results published 
by consultancy BCG showed.

Big tech companies including Microsoft, Alphabet's Google and Amazon.com 
have pressed ahead, courting thousands of businesses to give the latest 
AI a try.

Some have marketed message-drafting, meeting-summarising AI as a way to 
save employees time.

Google, which has long used AI in its products, is experimenting with a 
chatbot-like collaborator it calls Bard.

And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a company event in Davos 
Wednesday that AI is poised to grow productivity and potentially 
accelerate science itself.

Yet businesses' revenue and profit from recent efforts remain unclear.

'Get real about AI'

While one Davos sign exhorted passers-by, "Let's get real about AI," 
efforts to find a market for it have led developers to consider diverse 
places.

Cohere, a high-profile AI startup that is focused on enterprises, views 
helping salespeople as one revenue path.

"It's going to be on the sales side and making sales teams more 
productive," Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez told Reuters. The hope would be 
"helping them do more outreach, more follow-ups, and automating a lot of 
that process."

By contrast, medicine is more complicated. While speeding up note-taking 
for doctors is a worthy task for AI, automating the medical profession 
is not, as this could risk lives, said Gomez.

"We should be focused on assisting humans, not replacing doctors and 
having a chatbot doctor," Gomez said.

Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan said the drugmaker was working with 
Microsoft with the aim of more widely rolling out AI to give samples to 
staff who submit 20 to 30,000 regulatory responses a year. The "next 
opportunity," he said at Microsoft's event, would be AI for drug design.

Tejpreet Chopra, CEO of BLP Group, a major wind and solar operator in 
India, told Reuters he is ready to incorporate AI chat technology "but 
only for internal use for writing good English, not for content."

Elections are a high-stakes area concerning AI companies, as voters 
around the world head to the polls in 2024.

Regarding the use of AI in misinformation campaigns, Gomez said Cohere's 
policies prohibit impersonation, while Riparbelli said Synthesia does 
not allow customers to make political content through its AI video platform.

OpenAI, which also bans abusive impersonation through its technology, 
said it is working with the National Association of Secretaries of State 
in the US and will start directing users to CanIVote.org for 
election-related questions.

Understanding how content is created is a key concern among 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 know 
whether it is AI-generated or human generated," Prabhakar told Reuters 
in an interview.

For Srini Pallia, an executive at technology services and consulting 
company Wipro, the AI buzz at Davos is loud and clear, filling the void 
left by crypto.

"You know the conversations - it's AI, AI and more AI," Pallia said.


-- 
Roger Clarke                            mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
T: +61 2 6288 6916   http://www.xamax.com.au  http://www.rogerclarke.com

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA 

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University
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