Speech on Artificial Intelligence

International conference on innovation in Business & Research using AI organized by Patrician College of Arts and Science

27th September2024

Good afternoon to all of you and it's really a pleasure seeing all of you here. Very well-organized conference and you must all be attending it since morning and I know I'm keeping you away from lunch, so I will try to be very brief.

As you know, my background is finance and investments, and you may be wondering what I have to do with the artificial intelligence. Today I think the term artificial intelligence has become such a rage that nobody can ignore it because it is catching all of us in one form or another. Whether it is a new iPhone or if it's a new car, the selling point is always artificial intelligence. So, if you don't know what it is, I think it's high time we get to know it because it is affecting all of us.

Some technologies are normal, but other technologies are disruptive and artificial intelligence is one such technology which cuts across many other sectors. So that is why it has become the rage, but having been in the industry for so long, I can also tell you that sometimes things can be stretched beyond what they are capable of holding.

I would like to take you to year 2000 when Internet just caught up and became popular like artificial intelligence today. So there used to be a frenzy around Internet companies and it was called as the .com. So, any company with a .com or the term E attached to it, they came to the market with IPO's and they took money and it was called the .com frenzy. And then there was a crash and that was the .com bubble bursting. A lot of companies, thousands of them, died in the process. But if you reflect, you know, even though there was a .com burst but the Internet never died. Internet grew from strength to strength and so much so that today we use more Internet compared to the year 2000. I would say the same thing about artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is now disrupting everything. So, everyone is just crazy about artificial intelligence. Very few people, as Professor Vijay Raghavan was saying, really understand what artificial intelligence is apart from the fact that they know that there is something happening, but we do not know what it is. It is like a black box for many of us. A lot of companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars. I don't know if you know, maybe the Nvidia is one of the magnificent 7 companies in the S&P 500 that has now grown, I don't know, maybe 25 or 30 times in share price.

So, everywhere there is this resonance of artificial intelligence like .com. This will also come through a bubble burst type of a situation and then a lot of companies will fall, lot of losses will happen including jobs. While this is likely to happen but that doesn't mean the concept of artificial intelligence will die. Like internet, the concept will get better. But in the post bust world I think the people that will survive are the people who are tested, who withstood the shock and therefore the growth can happen very nicely.

In my little understanding as a finance person, artificial intelligence revolves around data. You can understand easily whether it is YouTube or WhatsApp or Facebook or any other app that you use, you create millions of data per second. So, data is the new gold. And what artificial intelligence does is to process this data first, collect them, clean them, store them and process them and use it. For intelligent application, that's what is happening. And even at this basic level of revolving around data, we see this frenzy. But imagine if artificial intelligence can start reasoning, not just analysing data, but it can think like you and me, and logically comprehend. This is what ChatGPT, the Strawberry project is all about. It is it's trying to write codes. In fact, recently the Strawberry version of ChatGPT solved a mathematical problem that is on par with the IITJEE type of a question. And when they analysed how the ChatGPT reasoned to get the answer they found a very remarkable closeness to how human minds think. So, when you are having a mathematical problem in IITJEE and you crack it, there are stages of reasoning that goes in your mind before you tick the final answer. ChatGPT has also started doing that now.

People are talking a little less about artificial intelligence capability. Because they say all it can do is process data efficiently. But when it comes to say creatively thinking like human brain, it will not be able to do that. It cannot invent a song like a music director. So, it will fail flat in creative domains now. I am sure someone will come and break that myth and will enable artificial intelligence to get into the logical reasoning creative part of our brain. Then imagine your life, if it starts doing that, what will you end up doing? So that is where the bubble burst is going to be envisaged.

Very interesting times, lot of opportunities both financially and from academic point of view. So many courses have been launched. New jobs are created only in the domain of artificial intelligence. It will take away many jobs. But it will create new jobs, it will cut across many, almost all parts of our life. So therefore, the topic is relevant, the topic is interesting, important, and I am happy to see that you have organized a conference around this beautiful topic. That's the perfect topic for youngsters like you. So, thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. In fact, I made several points, but I spoke none of them. So, it would be a pleasure to keep interacting with all of you. All the very best.