CEOs buzz about ChatGPT-style AI at World Economic Forum
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BUSINESS titans trudging through Alpine snow cannot stop talking about a chatbot from San Francisco.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI), technology that can invent virtually any content someone can think up and type into a text box, is garnering venture investment in Silicon Valley – as well as interest in Davos at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting this week.
Defining the category is ChatGPT, a chatbot that the startup OpenAI released in November. The tech works by learning from vast amounts of data to answer any prompt by a user in a human-like way, offering information like a search engine would or prose like an aspiring novelist.
Executives have floated wide-ranging applications for the nascent technology, from use as a programming assistant to a step forward in the global race for AI and military supremacy.
Conference-goers with a major stake in the development of the technology include Microsoft, whose chief executive officer (CEO), Satya Nadella, said the tech’s progress has not been linear.
AI capabilities would transform all of Microsoft’s products, he said in an on-stage interview with The Wall Street Journal.
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Microsoft has a US$1 billion investment in OpenAI that it is considering increasing, reported Reuters. The company recently announced it planned to market ChatGPT to its cloud-computing customers.
It has also added OpenAI’s image-generation software to its Bing search engine, in a new challenge to Alphabet’s Google.
On Tuesday (Jan 17), the political sphere will get to weigh in on the craze at Davos. French politician Jean-Noel Barrot is to join a panel discussion with a Sony Group executive on the technology’s impact.
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Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, which defends websites against cyberattacks and offers other cloud services, said generative AI was capable enough to be a junior programmer or a “really good thought partner”.
He said that Cloudflare was using such technology to write code on its Workers platform. The company was also exploring how the tech could answer inquiries more quickly for its free-tier customers.
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp said that generative AI could have military applications. His firm provides software that can help governments visualise an army’s movements, and enterprises vet their supply chains.
“The idea that an autonomous thing could generate results is basically obviously useful for war.”
The country that advances the fastest in AI capabilities is “going to define the law of the land”, he said, adding that it was worth asking how tech would play a role in any conflict with China.
Businesses such as CarMax, a used-vehicle retailer based in the US, are already using OpenAI’s technology to generate thousands of customer review summaries in its marketing efforts. Proposed venture-capital investment for generative AI has also exceeded what some startups are willing to take.
Such buzz carried through gatherings at Davos, including talk about a slide-generating bot dubbed ChatBCG after the management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group. The service said on its website that it had too much demand to keep operating.
Generative AI is “a game-changer that society and industry need to be ready for”, said an article on the World Economic Forum’s website. REUTERS
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