At Axios’ first AI+ Summit in San Francisco, leaders and critics of the AI revolution agreed that AI is changing the world, and it’s happening fast.
Tom Siebel, CEO of C3.ai and a four-decade veteran of Silicon Valley, warned the industry’s current front-runners against complacency. He pointed out that every time there’s been a major platform transition in Silicon Valley, newcomers have toppled incumbents.
The incumbents, however, are not giving up without a fight. They’re investing billions and releasing new AI-powered products at breakneck speed. Meta, for example, is flooding its social platforms with AI. Its head of generative AI, Ahmad Al-Dahle, gave a rundown of Instagram’s latest AI-based filters and tools. He also talked about Meta’s larger effort to make AI more accessible to developers.
Meta has released some of its AI models under partially open-source terms, which is more permissive than those of its competitors. Al-Dahle said that Meta’s researchers devoted 80% of their time working on “alignment” to make sure their AI models are “responsible.”
The democratization of AI is one of the biggest trends in the industry. Sonya Huang, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, said that developers can now access GPT models as an API, which makes AI development more accessible than ever before. However, not everyone is happy about the rise of AI.
Some people believe that AI builders are not playing fair. For example, Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, is concerned about the use of news content to train AI models without payment or permission.
The sources for this piece include an article in Axios.