Nearly half the world’s population would have the option to vote in a national election this year. The last time many of these countries went to the polls, there was no ChatGPT.
These are the two topics that keep coming up on panels and side events on the promenade this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Often the questions are about how one would affect the other.
Some of the leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) spoke at the Bloomberg House at Davos on Tuesday. They all said they took the threat of AI on elections seriously, but were split on the likelihood of disruption.
Photo: Reuters
Microsoft Corp CEO Satya Nadella somewhat downplayed the risks.
“It’s not like this is the first election where disinformation or misinformation, and election interference is going to be a real challenge that we all have to tackle,” he said.
OpenAI Inc CEO Sam Altman echoed that sentiment, but expressed more uncertainty.
“I don’t think this will be the same as before,” he said. “It’s always a mistake to try to fight the last war.”
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, in an interview with Bloomberg said the “bad guys will be more productive” with AI.
Meanwhile, Salesforce Inc CEO Marc Benioff said social media poses a bigger risk to the democratic process than AI does.
“Regulators have not done their job,” he said.
OpenAI, which counts Microsoft as its largest investor, is “quite focused,” Altman said, on reducing the potential for misuse of its tools, such as ChatGPT and DALL-E.
The company is soon to release for testing a tool that can identify AI-generated content and would digitally watermark material generated by DALL-E, OpenAI said on Monday.
In related news, a large number of CEOs worldwide realize the need to move fast on generative AI to stay competitive, but many agree that uncertainty makes it difficult to formulate and adopt strategies, Ernst & Young Taiwan’s (安永台灣) quarterly survey released on Thursday last week showed.
About 70 percent of the 1,200 CEOs surveyed said they realize their organizations must take immediate action to keep a competitive advantage, as generative AI proves to be an agile coadviser and multiplier in strengthening supply chains, with 99 percent of the respondents having made or planning to make significant investments in generative AI.
However, 68 percent said that the uncertainty of generative AI makes it difficult to quickly formulate and adopt strategies, while 26 percent said the rapid development of generative AI presents the biggest challenge for planning and making capital allocation decisions.
There are limitations and risks to the use of generative AI in supply chains, especially when implementation is rushed or poorly integrated across organizations and supply chain networks, Ernst & Young Taiwan said, adding that AI tools are only as powerful as their input data, making them limited to the quality and availability of data from supply chain partners.
Additional reporting by Crystal Hsu
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS