Artificial Intelligence and the Return of the Industrial Policy; AGI is not happening anytime soon
From Abhivardhan, our Chairperson
This is a post authored by Mr Abhivardhan, our Founder and Chairperson.
As WEF 2024 progresses, I found Satya Nadella's remark on global economic growth interesting. He says that economic growth does not exist, and in the developed world, the economic growth has been negative. (My AI and Law book is out now: https://amzn.eu/d/4OWJnIo) His point on leveraging AI from genuine global growth (since something has to give to overcome a global systems-to-systems collapse) is also fair enough.
Interestingly, Apple came up with an ad to feature the manufacturing process of their product, Apple Vision Pro. For now, even for the minimalistic standards of Apple as an example, they were not that open to show off their manufacturing processes in their marketing content.
This transition to show more factory-level processes shows the global giants' desperation to invest in manufacturing and real growth. Now, on artificial intelligence: my view is that it is possible to drive growth by involving credible general purpose AI systems.
This is why GenAI must not be limited to ChatGPT or Bard. While regulation of AI systems is equally important to avoid scandals and systems-of-systems collapse, it is suggested that companies focus on building AI innovations which survive beyond a 6-12 month period, which do not collapse in terms of their outputs, their use cases and their commercial value.
I say it again - money is king. You cannot earn well using AI or create a future industry using AI if your factory robot or GenAI visualisation service offers Garbage-in-Garbage-Out outputs/outcomes.
In India also, I do not see our major tech companies keeping in mind to invest in credible AI use cases. Very few companies who are tailor-made in this are doing, and not waiting for any economic or technical innovation from OpenAI or Google.
Even then, for example in agriculture - India would have to offer subsidised help to farmers to use GenAI tools to check crop health. But if we return to a New Industrial Policy approach by focusing on growth and manufacturing, I am sure AI can be leveraged that way.
Well, this also reminds me of an important discourse on AGI.
AGI is not happening soon, and that’s good
One of the takeaways from Andrew Ng's post on X on AI discussions at the World Economic Forum struck me.
He says - "I'm happy to report that the conversation is much more sensible than 6 months ago. For example, the unnecessary fears and discussion on AI extinction risk is fading away. But some big companies are still pushing for stifling, anti-competitive regulations, and the fight to protect open-source is still far from won." (Read the complete post here.)
The concern he has raised is viable. Even in a recent research by University of Copenhagen (read here) shows that AGI cannot be achieved so quickly and easily considering the fact that the AI advancements as of now would not lead to the path to achieve AGI.
Even existing Cloud AI do limited things quite well and complexities really poorly. This is why while people usually hype around AI - I have always suggested for a long time through the Indian Society of Artificial Intelligence and Law to foster AI innovations which can be tangibly standardised. This is the ultimate necessity to foster an AI-based future, which is innovative, safe and tangible.
What do you think?
You can also put your views here in the original LinkedIn Post.