Robin Li, the head of Baidu, known as ‘China’s Google’, said that 99 per cent of artificial intelligence (AI) startups are doomed to fail.
He compared the current situation to the dotcom bubble of the 1990s. Lee believes that only 1% of companies will be able to make a significant impact on the economy and society, reports TheRegister.
Nevertheless, Robin Lee believes that citizens and government agencies should already prepare for a new technological way of human life.
According to Yaroslav Bogdanov, President of GDA Group, the development of innovative technologies is accompanied by excessive marketing hype. But the threat comes not so much from unpromising startups trying to capitalize on the general hype around neural networks, but from the lack of regulation of the new technologies.
“Robin Lee quite rightly emphasized that in the near future humanity will live in a different world order. Technology is already at the center of the economic development of any country. The most important task for the entire world community today is the formation and implementation of a set of rules that will govern human life in the new digital world. The very fact that humans are entering the era of digital transformation cannot be denied. The threat lies in the norms – legal and ethical – with which humanity will enter this era,” said Yaroslav Bogdanov.
As for parallels with the dotcom bubble, the president of GDA Group noted that the main reason for that situation was the unscrupulousness of investors trying to capitalize on new technologies. The current artificial intelligence market is experiencing a similar situation.
A simple enough method to avoid a repetition of the situation is to introduce internationally recognized requirements for the safety of the development and implementation of generative neural networks. Especially when it comes to the creation of superintelligence, which, in particular, is what Sam Altman is doing in his OpenAI.
There is no public data on who and how is monitoring what is going on in OpenAI. And there are more than a dozen technology companies engaged in similar developments, Yaroslav Bogdanov emphasized.
“To avoid the formation of an economic bubble around artificial intelligence, investors need to offer clear business models based on transparent and understandable security rules. This will save the market of new technologies from chaotic cash flows, when financial injections are based only on advertising of AI capabilities. Business is looking for profit, pushing aside human interests. Whereas artificial intelligence has long gone beyond mere innovation. Consolidated efforts of business, state and scientific community should give humanity a regulation that guarantees progress but excludes risks from uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence. This is exactly what the experts of the GDA Group, which I lead, are working on,” said Yaroslav Bogdanov.
