Tech Explained: Here’s a simplified explanation of the latest technology update around Tech Explained: Global tech leaders call for collective action at the India AI Impact Summit in Simple Termsand what it means for users..
The world must come together to pursue AI boldly and responsibly, as the technology’s positive outcome is neither guaranteed, nor will it be automatic, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said. “We have the opportunity to improve lives at a once-in-a generation scale,” he said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the world may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true super intelligence—by the end of 2028. “We continue to believe that iterative deployment is a key strategic insight, and that society needs to contend with and use each successive new level of AI capability, have time to integrate it, understand it and decide how to move forward,” he said.
Altman’s optimism about AI’s development was also echoed by Google DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis, who said artificial general intelligence (AGI) is now “on the horizon” and could be more transformative than the Industrial Revolution, unfolding at unprecedented speed.
Describing the moment as one of the most consequential in human history, Hassabis said AGI could have “ten times the impact of the Industrial Revolution, probably at ten times the speed of anything else.” However, he added, “it’s still to be written how we can make that beneficial for the whole world”.
Other executives opted to temper expectations of a radical shift in enterprise adoption of AI.
“While AI models are improving exponentially in areas such as software engineering and biomedical research, adoption across enterprises and economies will be slower,” said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. He pointed out the duality that exists between the fundamental capabilities of the technology and the time it takes for those capabilities to diffuse into the world.
The growing global push to democratise AI will face an inevitable challenge from commercial enterprises who want to keep information proprietary, said Shantanu Narayen, chairman and CEO of software major Adobe Systems. “Companies have to behave differently and recognise what their sustainable advantage is. It can’t over time be just the model. It has to be the use cases—what people are doing with the models,” Narayen stressed.
In the information technology services industry, which continues to suffer from the ominous predictions of job losses, AI will end up creating many more jobs through companies that are able to reinvent themselves and capture the technology’s full potential, said Accenture CEO Julie Sweet. She drew lessons from 2013, when an Oxford University study warned that 47% of US jobs were automatable and robotic process automation was expected to damage IT services. However, the opposite happened.
Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith warned that AI could either close or exacerbate the economic and technology divide between the developed world and the Global South. He also stressed human intelligence will not be replaced by AI, since the former is neither fixed, nor finite. “Let’s also recognise this: compared to the people who lived in the Bronze Age, all of you, all of us are already geniuses,” he said.