Jun 14, 2023

Inside The Minds of AI Leaders: What Are The Risks & Opportunities On The Horizon 2 Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. That was the one-sentence statement – signed by startup leaders and CEOs and even presidents around the globe – issued last month by The Centre for AI Safety . And that “risk of extinction” talk is on top of the near-daily industry reports forecasting AI taking over for retail workers, coders, lawyers, and writers . Now, artificial intelligence has been part of the tech world for decades in some form or another. But the big difference here in 2023 is the fact that now just about everyone has access to generative AI, or AI that creates new content by learning from existing data. We’ve talked to many artificial intelligence leaders building companies in the region over the years, so we wanted to check in and get their take on the Center for AI Safety’s letter. Paul Noble , Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Atlanta-based Verusen , pointed out that this isn’t the first time there has been panic surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence. “Overall, there is a global sentiment of needing to understand how powerful this can get and how quickly, and we need to examine those risks. It is a critical discussion to have. If we look back five to 10 years ago, when AI was mentioned, it was always related to Skynet and Terminator and the end of the world,” Noble told Hypepotamus. Joshua Jones , co-founder and CEO of Birmingham-based Quanthub , said it is important to put generative AI’s capabilities into context. “Stephen Hawking once observed: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.” Most of the tools gaining attention at the moment are those relating to generative AI, which at times, leads us down this path. Using a certain body of text, images, or video, we are building a predictive model of what might come next, given a particular prompt. The results have recently gotten so good that people forget it is a “prediction” of what might be said, and instead take it for fact,” Jones told Hypepotamus. So armed with a healthy dose of fear…and perhaps a large dose of optimism…we wanted to get a sense about how startup leaders across the Southeast are really feeling about the future of AI. Here is a look into three things that are top of mind: AI Should Be Seen As A Productivity Hack For Noble and the Verusen team, generative AI will bring about more “purpose-built applications” to “help augment humans and remove a lot of manual and mundane tasks, models that can read through massive amounts of data, and natural languages that will help advance more than hurt the world.” For Jones and the team over Quanthub, AI is integrated into the daily workflow, but human guardrails are always in place. “QuantHub leverages generative AI extensively, and we have a whole team dedicated to prompt engineering. We use it in a wide variety of applications, but we don’t use it anywhere that there isn’t a human in the loop or subject matter expert closely controlling its usage. We consider it as a productivity hack and way to see incremental gains in each of our roles,” Jones added. Like many other startups, Quanthub is leveraging well-known AI tools like GPT, Grammarly, Synthesio, Powerpoint Presenter Coach, and Outlook’s growing number of prediction models. “We’ve relied on AI in other underappreciated areas, like cybersecurity and spam for years; we’re just now hitting a critical mass of applications where everyone is re-thinking activities they’ve always taken for granted,” added Jones. AI Can Be A Product Differentiator It’s hard to read through any  pitch deck today and not see the word “AI” across multiple slides. The reality is that many startups – and every larger corporation for that matter – are positioning themselves as an AI-enabled venture. For Rajiv Garg , associate professor at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, generative AI is set to usher in a new era of personalization within the tech world. And that can be a key way companies can differentiate their products and services. “Think about the time when people were adopting computers. They were saying that computers can improve productivity, help us do things better, faster, and cheaper. AI is going to do the same thing. When it’s deployed correctly, it’s going to automate [and] it’s going to personalize,” said Garg. Noble said that he sees AI as a competitive advantage, particularly as he builds within the increasingly crowded supply chain space. “The rise of AI is a good thing for us. There is a lot of noise because everyone’s going to market, but a lot of it is vaporware and only a little is true purpose-built AI,” he told Hypepotamus. “We expect to see many more plugins from Open AI, and just about every other large organization has come out with its generative AI offering, which can be a front for services and consulting. But in speaking with our partners, we’ve been here building purpose-built AI applications for several years. We’ll continue to lean in and offer more features and capabilities around search and further improve the experience off a solid, purpose-built foundation, which has everyone excited. So, it’s both a headwind and a tailwind because the noise will confuse many buyers in our industry (and all industries) regarding what’s real and what’s not. But once you dig in and learn what’s happening and why, everyone is excited and bullish about what we can achieve and what it will mean for our industry.” There Is A Lot Of Room For AI Innovation Silos. It’s a word that sounds like nails on a chalkboard to anyone working inside of a tech company. When products are built in silos, inefficiencies and redundancies inevitably creep in. Garg told Hypepotamus that as individual companies dive head first into the AI space, there will be a lot of silos built. But there will be a lot of room for innovation as companies realize the need to connect all their AI innovation together in the coming years. “There’s going to be a time where all these organizations have to say, look, I’m going to share data, I’m going to connect, I’m going to have some sort of mechanisms for AI to share their insights, their models, and their outputs with each other, so we can actually do a much bigger and much better job,” Garg said. “That’s when you will have much more robust AI systems that can manage to perform a lot of the different tasks within the organization and truly reach a point where human labor will be used for a lot of creative content or collaborative generation … .the daily tasks that people do, those jobs will be replaced. So we need to then build a workforce that actually works with the AI systems to do something more phenomenal.”