AI is developing software at the speed of light, Mistral CEO says

Major figures in artificial intelligence (AI) gathered in India this week at the AI Impact Summit, where they discussed the technology’s capabilities and warned about its dangers.

This article is part of Cybernews’ weekly series, “AI week in quotes,” summarizing the most important developments in AI by quotes from the industry leaders, independent experts, and decision makers.

Automaton doesn’t bring us to Web 4.0

Sigil Wen, a fellow at Peter Thiel’s fellowship, has announced the launch of Automaton – AI that “earns its own existence” and pays for its own compute without human intervention.

The creator of Automaton has signalled the beginning of Web 4.0, the hypothetical next-generation internet driven by AI. However, some experts are skeptical about his claims.

Nicola Ianeselli, an innovation and virtual design and construction leader at WGI, has called Web 4.0 “an undefined marketing buzzword” used to generate hype and attract venture capital. He told Cybernews that the release of Automaton is not a paradigm shift.

Until an AI can negotiate complex, real-world economic contracts and sustainably cover its compute costs through verifiable, non-speculative value creation, any claims of ‘Web 4.0’ are just marketing fluff.

Nicola Ianeselli

Companies are “AI-washing” layoffs

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, admitted what experts and data have been telling for a while now: some companies falsely attribute AI as the reason for layoffs, a phenomenon called “AI-washing.”

I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs.

Sam Altman

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit, Altman told CNBC-TV18 that “the real impact of AI doing jobs” would become palpable in the next few years. Meanwhile, new types of jobs will emerge due to AI.

Developing software “at the speed of light”

Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI, has said during the AI Impact Summit that over half of enterprises’ current software could be replaced by AI.

He claimed AI can create fully custom applications to run a procurement workflow or supply chain workflows in “a couple of days,” unlike five years ago, when the company would need “a vertical SaaS.”

AI is making us able to develop software at the speed of light.

Arthur Mensch

“Russian roulette with humanity”

India’s summit has also attracted independent AI researchers who voiced their concerns about the lack of regulation of technology.

Stuart Russell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the major companies, locked in an “AI arms race,” understand the dangers posed by superintelligent technology.

While CEOs of these companies want to “disarm,” they cannot do so “unilaterally” out of fear of angering investors.

For governments to allow private entities to essentially play Russian roulette with every human being on earth is, in my view, a total dereliction of duty.

Stuart Russell

Amodei rejects “domestic mass surveillance”

Industry watchers closely followed the feud between the Pentagon and Anthropic after Axios reported that the Department of War (DOW) was considering ending its relations with the AI company over its insistence on maintaining restrictions on how the military uses its models.

The news came along with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Anthropic’s Claude was used in the US military operations in Venezuela to capture the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro.

According to Axios reports, Anthropic wants assurance that its models will not be used for autonomous weapons or to “spy on Americans en masse.” Such claims were reiterated by the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, in his interview for CNBC-TV18.

We have been deploying our models for the US National Security for quite a while...our main area of concern is fully autonomous weapons and the domestic mass surveillance of Americans.

Dario Amodei

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