Maybe AI will kill us all. It may even take away our jobs. Perhaps it will be great and improve our lives beyond our imagination. Or maybe this is all hype and destined to go the way of the Metaverse. While there are many unknowns surrounding artificial intelligence, one thing is true. That’s something most people are lying about, bit by bit, at this point.
Companies know that investors are now interested in artificial intelligence in general, and are eager to explain how they are incorporating the new technology into their businesses, or at least claim that they are. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler recently warned about “AI washing,” or giving the false impression that companies are using AI to attract more investors. And while some companies simply exaggerate the technology they legally use, others go a step further. In March, the SEC settled charges against two investment advisers who were accused of making “false and misleading statements” about how they use AI. One of those companies, Delphia, used AI to “predict which companies and trends are poised for big growth and invest in them before anyone else,” although it wasn’t, according to regulators. He claimed to have used the. Another company, Global Predictions, falsely referred to itself as “the first regulated AI financial advisor,” according to the SEC. The companies agreed to pay civil penalties totaling $400,000 without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings.
Most companies aren’t accused of breaking laws due to AI chatter, but they’re definitely getting away with it. According to a Goldman Sachs analysis, 36% of S&P 500 companies mentioned AI in their fourth-quarter earnings calls, a record high. Companies are just attending Nvidia’s small AI Woodstock event (his four-day AI conference held at an arena in San Jose, Calif.) and will get a halo effect of jobs just by attending the chipmaker’s presence. I was hoping for that.How much? There Many of these AI claims contain exaggerations.
“There’s a certain grandeur to what’s being discussed in terms of possibility, and part of it is that people don’t know if or when some of these things will be possible. I think that’s the case,” said Scott Kessler, Global Sector Leader. said Third Bridge Group Technology, Media and Telecommunications Director. “People are very excited, and rightfully so in some cases, but these things don’t happen overnight.”
There’s a certain grandeur to what’s being discussed in terms of possibility, and part of it is that people don’t know if and when some of these things will be possible. I think that’s true.
While some companies are clearly just incorporating AI ideas into their existing businesses, even projects explicitly aimed at developing the next wave of this technology are encountering stumbling blocks. Google’s Gemini rollout has been thrown into turmoil amid criticism that it’s “woke” and biased and can’t seem to decide whether Elon Musk is better or worse than Adolf Hitler. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has generated a lot of buzz over the last year, but it still tends to be a hoax.
“Release of ChatGPT was kind of a great marketing campaign. It worked really well. It completely captivated people,” said Roberts, a professor at MIT’s Institute of Economics and author of the recently released “Power and Progress: Our.” said co-author Daron Acemoglu. A thousand-year struggle for technology and prosperity. He said ChatGPT has some “pretty impressive achievements” embedded in it, which may indicate potential, but that OpenAI has the ability to raise funding, attract talent, and compete He said he promoted the product as much as possible to compete in the technology industry.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and the voice/savior of the AI industry, still talks about this technology in vague, nonspecific, and sometimes hyperbolic ways. As technology writer Ed Zitron pointed out, his children have more AI friends than human friends, raising eyebrows as technology will replace almost everything marketing agencies do. There are also claims like this. It’s not that Mr. Altman is dishonest. But it’s not very clear what the technology’s current capabilities actually are, much less what they will be in the future, so making bold, concrete claims about what impact it will have is difficult. Society seems arrogant.
But what is clear is that there is a belief that there are huge profits to be made, and overselling is almost constant in the AI industry. The semiconductor industry is seeing tremendous demand on the infrastructure side of AI, but not all companies in this space are created equal. Companies like Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom are the big winners, but “there are companies that want to be part of the story,” said Angelo Gino, senior industry analyst at CFRA Research. “How they roll it out is something along the lines of, ‘We expect AI to be a huge benefit to our business, and we’re seeing an increase in AI-related orders.’ , it could be a hard drive manufacturer. , it’s not necessarily an AI play,” he said.
Many of these companies don’t reveal exactly how much revenue they’re getting from AI because it’s still small-scale.
Even the big tech companies that are moving and shaking in the AI space are sometimes on shaky ground. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are telling sales executives to keep quiet about how they market their generative AI capabilities to customers, The Information reported. Just because you’re incorporating his AI into your service doesn’t mean it’s actually useful enough for a significant portion of your customers to pay a lot of money for it. Consider the example of his Copilot from Microsoft. The company is not disclosing many details regarding its revenue at this time.
“Many of these companies are still small, so they haven’t yet disclosed exactly what kind of revenue they’re getting from AI,” Gino said.
When non-tech companies talk about AI, it’s hard to determine exactly who means what, or the relationship between hope and reality. I recently found myself in a conversation with a bank executive touting her company’s efforts in generative AI. She thought it was something big and when I asked her what she meant, she said she was thinking about how to use AI to help call center agents search for information. This is probably a good thing for new employees who are trying to get the hang of things. However, that doesn’t change the situation.
AI innovation is an important development. There are many reasons to believe that this is not dot-com bubble 2.0, or even cryptocurrencies, and that this technology will have a meaningful, if not yet defined, impact. (Hopefully it’s not something that will wipe out humanity.) But the financial incentives here make it easy and tempting to exaggerate things. For many companies and entrepreneurs in this space, their wildest dreams regarding AI are dollar signs.
“If you’re a medium to large company and you’re not talking about integrating generative AI into your workflow in some way, you’re kind of cascading and becoming obsolete,” Acemoglu said. Told. “And I think the dream of automation is never far from many managers’ minds.”
What generative AI and what comes with it is completely unknown, and that’s both worrying and reassuring. The super-optimistic and super-pessimistic views are probably wrong, meaning the truth will ultimately be somewhere in the middle. But anyone who says they know exactly what’s going on with AI or where it’s headed is lying.
emily stewart As a senior correspondent for Business Insider, he writes about business and economics.
