KUALA LUMPUR: Artificial intelligence (AI) will experience a groundbreaking year in 2024 when there will be mainstream adoption of the technology, said AI futurist and former head of go-to-market strategy at OpenAI, Zack Kass.
He anticipates broad mainstream adoption of AI and a surge in the quality of tools and products embedded with AI technology next year.
“All of the tools and products, I mean this is a great example that we use every day, we’ll get better and better because they will have AI embedded in them. We will go through this incredible phase of enhanced AI applications. I think that 2024 will be this era when, or this year when people go, ‘oh wow’, AI is going to make our lives a whole lot better across a swath of things,” Kass told reporters in an interview at Malaysia Digital Expo 2023 at the Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre recently.
He is optimistic about AI adoption in Asia and highlighted the region’s significant potential. He noted that people in Asia are adept at swiftly updating their economies and described it as a technologically advanced environment.
“If you look at how far the Malaysian economy has come from an agrarian society to a flourishing industrial society, it’s pretty incredible. I think that alone presents the same opportunity for the future,” he stated.
On the ethical conversation of AI, Kass stressed the need to simplify the ethical discourse surrounding AI, focusing on key questions related to the construction, operation, users, and purposes of AI models.
“The two that are most interesting to me are who is using the models and what are they being used for? That to me is like the ultimate ethical question with respect to AI,” he said.
Regarding innovation, Kass is confident about the ethical operation of businesses in the western world, attributing it to their adherence to established codes of ethics.
“Generally with respect to ethics, the question comes back to who’s using the models and what are they being used for, and I really think that the broader question should be around general business ethics.
“(For example) If a game designer is doing something that is unethical, whether or not they are using AI, then they should be held accountable. And if they’re using AI in an unethical capacity, then they should be held accountable.
“The reason that AI and ethics is such a hot topic is because AI presents a lot of new ways to do business, which we haven’t yet explored. But that doesn’t change the fact that we should just be holding people accountable who are unethical, whether they’re using AI or not,” Kass said.
