Good morning.
The conversations at Fortune Brainstorm AI this week felt a bit like bungee jumping: extraordinary highs followed by deep lows. Speakers gave remarkable examples of how the technology could lead to a surge in business productivity, supercharge drug discovery, alleviate loneliness, and enable Hollywood actors to achieve agelessness. But at the same time, they also highlighted the problems and risks, including biased training data, poorly protected intellectual property, troublesome hallucinations and a corrupted information ecosystem. I left with a clear sense that we are at the dawn of an extraordinary new era…but an era with great potential for good and ill.
A few excerpts from the day:
“Everyone is going to have their own personal intelligence. It will be for you. And your thing might be ‘I’m a new mom, and I need help navigating this.’ Your thing might be, ‘I have this problem at work,’ or your thing might be, ‘How do I fix this toaster,’ or your thing might be, ‘I want to have a philosophical conversation.’ Whatever that might be for you, and that will be different for each of us.”
—Reid Hoffman, partner, Greylock
“Every new technology has its pros and cons. There’s huge upside with AI, and then there are some disadvantages…But by far—orders of magnitude—the higher risk to worry about is China, not sentient AI killing us.”
—Vinod Khosla, founder, Khosla Ventures
“The first piece of advice [for businesses] I’d start with is: Invest more in the people than the technology. Those that really focus on the people are going to be successful…And focus on responsible AI. Ninety-five percent of executives say they believe in responsible AI. Only 6% have responsible AI programs in place in the company. So there’s a big gap.”
—Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Accenture
At Fortune, we’re committed to continuing this conversation. We believe there’s good that comes from convening business leaders to share ideas and focus on both the possibilities and the risks. We announced yesterday that we will be expanding the Brainstorm AI franchise, in partnership with Accenture, to events next year in London (April 15-16), Singapore (July 30-31) and again here in San Francisco (Dec. 9-10). If you’re interested, get in touch: BrainstormAI@fortune.com.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
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