AI Steals the Show at WEF 2024

AI dominated the discussions at the Davos World Economic Forum 2024. AIM noted that most of the talk revolved around the urgency of AI adoption, its impact on education and reskilling of the workforce, regulation and responsible use of AI, implications on jobs and more.

As per the latest IMF report ‘Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work’, AI exposure in India remains at about 26% compared to advanced economies at 60%. The report further noted that a significant portion of the workforce in India is engaged in crafts, agriculture, and low-skilled work, which fall into the low-exposure category.?

If these numbers are accurate, then the next few years will be crucial for India to accelerate AI adoption across industries. “If you embrace artificial intelligence, you will be complete. If you do not and you're late, you will be finished. And if you reject it altogether, you will be completely finished,” cautioned Omar Sultan Al Olama, the minister of state for artificial intelligence in the United Arab Emirates.?

IBM chief Arvind Krishna believes that AI in its current form will generate $4 trillion of annual productivity before the end of the decade. “That is incredible economic competitiveness for companies and nations,” he said, citing a productivity increase of 20-30-40% in coding. He also noted a similar trend in customer service and digital jobs.?

In conversation with WEF chairperson Klaus Schwab, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella shared how generative AI is going to impact industries and jobs and how AI can be the growth driver for many economies.?

“Inflation adjusted, there is no economic growth in the world. It is a pretty disappointing state. The developed world may have negative economic growth,” said Nadella, adding that he is optimistic about AI being a general-purpose technology that can drive economic growth.?

Another notable discussion at WEF revolved around the workings of open-source and closed-door AI models. “OpenAI does not have a monopoly on good ideas. They’re not going to get to AGI by themselves, in fact, they’re using PyTorch, and Transformers, which was published by many of us. They’re profiting from the open research landscape,” said Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, emphasising the role of open-source AI models and how they shape cultures, languages, and values.?

Upcoming innovations and LLM scaling were discussed extensively, too. “This year, we’ll see the image processing revolution, autonomous agents going off and doing the work for us, and edge AI on our own devices — all these vectors of innovation,” said DeepLearning.AI chief Andrew Ng. Aiden Gomez, CEO and founder of Cohere echoed this sentiment, saying, “We’re not done with scaling LLMs; we still need to push up.”

The NYT copyright case also came up at the event. “We wanted to pay The New York Times a lot of money to display their content,” said OpenAI’s Sam Altman, adding that the case came as a surprise for them.?

Check out all the notable talks at WEF 2024 here.

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