The second day of the Web Summit in Lisbon featured a debate on the role of artificial intelligence in society
11/13/2024
The opportunities, challenges, and especially the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) dominated discussions on the second day of the Web Summit in Lisbon, one of the world’s largest technology conferences. Beyond the giants responsible for the necessary infrastructure for applications, such as chip manufacturers, other businesses are now seeing AI as a means to enhance user interaction and rethink purchasing processes.
Brazilian Cristiano Amon, CEO of chip maker Qualcomm, believes AI will significantly impact how users interact with their mobile devices.
Qualcomm is banking on AI being closer to the user, operating on their devices, and less dependent on large data centers. “There’s a lot of investment going into data centers. What we are doing is changing that by bringing AI to where humans are. It costs differently when you run AI on your own device,” he said.
According to Mr. Amon, generative AI—using AI to create new content such as text and images—is the future of applications. “Generative AI will be the new user interface,” he stated. Mr. Amon used future banking applications as examples, where users will no longer have to follow steps to check their balance. They will simply ask AI, which will provide the information. “The apps we have today, their development will shift to an AI-first experience,” he added.
The changes brought about by AI are also on Alibaba’s radar, the retail giant that launched an AI tool to improve corporate procurement experiences. The platform is called Accio. Kuo Zhang, president of Alibaba.com, believes that AI tools can go beyond the well-known chatbots (software that responds to inquiries) and help redefine global commerce as we know it today.
“Today, it takes about 28 steps to find an item and complete a transaction. In this process, we have dozens of user experience barriers. AI is a technology to address these issues,” he explained. With Accio, a company can upload a spreadsheet with purchase items, and the AI will search for them.
Alibaba aims to ride the wave created by ChatGPT—the world’s most famous chatbot, developed by OpenAI—and boost sales. According to Alibaba’s data, initial surveys showed that the purchasing intent of companies using the new tool is 40% higher than traditional search engines. The platform uses data from over 50 million companies connected to the Asian giant.
Despite all efforts to understand AI’s role in the future, it remains unclear. “Most of the time when we try to predict the future, we are wrong,” said Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief scientist of the collaborative platform Hugging Face.
Mr. Wolf mentioned that projections about AI often lead discussions into the realm of utopia. “We need to imagine how AI will integrate into society, and I think it will be much like the internet. It will be everywhere,” he noted.
There are signs that the world will see a significant leap in robotics by 2025, Mr. Wolf suggested. “The big question is what task humans will perform in the future,” he pondered, posing a challenge to Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on studying technology’s impact on society.
Mr. Tegmark gave an extensive response: “I think asking what humans can do better than machines is not the right question. Our brain is a biological computer. There’s nothing we can do now that machines couldn’t do better if we want them to. But we are the ones building this future. Why would we force ourselves to compete with machines? It doesn’t make sense. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens because of our intelligence. Maybe there’s something more valuable in us than that. I don’t think everything should be handed over to machines in the future.”
Hamilton Mann, vice president of the digital branch at Thales, a French defense company, said the doubts surrounding AI in society are natural. “This is new for us too. We are also learning, just as AI is evolving in society,” he said. Within Thales, Mr. Mann explained, technological development and the use of AI center on the human. “It’s about creating a system that will equip humans, who will be responsible for making decisions,” Mr. Mann concluded.
The reporter’s travel costs were covered by the Web Summit.
*By Cristian Favaro — Lisbon
Source: Valor International