Generative AI dominates Davos discussions as companies focus on accuracy
Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, at the Hope Global Forums annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, US, on Monday, Dec. 11, 2023.
Dustin Chambers | Bloomberg | Getty Images
DAVOS, Switzerland — The rise of generative artificial intelligence has dominated private and public discussion at the World Economic Forum as the world’s largest technology companies, including Salesforce, Microsoft and Google, temporarily take over local storefronts as a show of force to conference attendees.
While 2023 highlighted the technology’s ability, 2024 will be about increasing the accuracy of results so that executives in high-stakes industries such as hospitals and manufacturing can get comfortable using AI, said Intel Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger in a CNBC interview.
“You’ve now reached the end of today’s AI utility,” Gelsinger said. “This next phase of AI, I believe, will be about building formal correctness into the underlying models.”
Whether it’s doctors relying on artificial general intelligence (AGI) for diagnoses, warehouses using it to check for assembly line malfunctions, or automated driving, humans need to get more comfortable with the accuracy of the technology, Gelsinger said.
“Certain problems are well solved today in AI, but there’s lots of problems that aren’t,” Gelsinger said. “Basic prediction, detection, visual language, those are solved problems right now. There’s a whole lot of other problems that aren’t solved. How do you prove that a large language model is actually right? There’s a lot of errors today. So you still need you know, essentially, I’m improving the productivity of a knowledge worker. But at the end of the day, I need the knowledge worker to say is it right.”
Pat Gelsinger, CEO Intel, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box at the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 16th, 2024.
Adam Galici | CNBC
The best way to improve accuracy is through experimentation and co-piloting tests to advance adoption, said Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI. The AI can adjust to different standard deviation confidence levels as users get comfortable that the technology can be trusted in high-stakes scenarios, Shih said in an interview.
Three phases of AGI will guide adoption, Shih said. Phase one is actively using the technology as an assist for work. Phase two is consciously watching the technology in its autopilot mode to ensure accuracy. The final phase is letting go and trusting the technology will work to the confidence level of one’s choice, Shih said.
“You can tell the AI to be conservative for higher stakes until a human co-pilot essentially graduates it to autopilot,” Shih explained.
The three-phase approach, which heavily draws upon human acceptance of the reliability of the technology, should make AGI less scary than some have speculated, said Open AI CEO Sam Altman during a panel discussion Tuesday with Bloomberg’s Brad Stone.
“This is much more of a tool than I expected,” Altman said. “It’ll get better, but it’s not yet replacing jobs. It is this incredible tool for productivity. This is a tool that magnifies what humans do, lets people do their jobs better, and lets the AI do parts of jobs.”
The past year has been “a year of discovery,” said Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman in an interview. The financial industry, including Nasdaq, will use AI to update old code to modernize aging systems, improving automated workflows which can save employees hours each day, Friedman said.
“It came onto the scene a little over a year ago,” Friedman said. “We did some experimentation. We started to kind of understand the potential of it. This year will be the year of activations for us and for everyone.”
WATCH: Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman discusses economy, opportunities in AI at Davos
Technology
Amazon was questioned by House China committee over ‘dangerous and unwise’ TikTok partnership
Amazon logo on a brick building exterior, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2024.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Amazon representatives met with the House China committee in recent months to discuss lawmaker concerns over the company’s partnership with TikTok, CNBC confirmed.
A spokesperson for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the meeting, which centered on a shopping deal between Amazon and TikTok announced in August. The agreement allows users of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, to link their account with Amazon and make purchases from the site without leaving TikTok.
“The Select Committee conveyed to Amazon that it is dangerous and unwise for Amazon to partner with TikTok given the grave national security threat the app poses,” the spokesperson said. The parties met in September, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
Representatives from Amazon and TikTok did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
TikTok’s future viability in the U.S. is uncertain. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19. If TikTok fails to cut ties with its parent company, app stores and internet hosting services would be prohibited from offering the app.
President-elect Donald Trump could rescue TikTok from a potential U.S. ban. He promised on the campaign trail that he would “save” TikTok, and said in a March interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” with the app.
In his first administration, Trump had tried to implement a TikTok ban. He changed his stance around the time he met with billionaire Jeff Yass. The Republican megadonor’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass has a 7% stake in the company, NBC and CNBC reported in March.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
Technology
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Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.
Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.
Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.
“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.
“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.
“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”
Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.
“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.
‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’
Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.
She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”
She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”
Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.
“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.
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