What would you be doing right now, today to prepare for two or to incorporate a
high? Well, David, it's an excellent question.
And as I think about it, I would think about all the lessons I've learned in
the past, either running IBM or or if I was currently a CEO.
What I've learned over the past 10 or 15 years, and that is that we face these
challenges before. There's always been these disruptive
technologies that come along. They represent trimmed from phenomenal
promise, but also they can be disruptive.
A couple of different paths. I mean, I'll make some suggestions, but
you could dismiss it. You wait and see.
But then you learn. We learned in the last time that you can
be left behind. If you do that and other leaders emerge
in your peer group. Another way to do is let it just go like
that would be the early days of the Internet.
Just let it run. And then the problem is that you have to
clean it all up, know. And that takes time.
You lose some momentum, also cautious, some money and those sorts of things
that I would start with create a management system that takes advantage
of these technologies and your strategy and implement that company wide.
The benefit of starting there is you won't have the problems of the past with
digitization and the internet and plus you can scale and integrate and learn a
lot quicker once you get your footing and you know where you want to go to
take your business. The other thing is
that I'll add as these these technologies are going to mature and
they will. I mean, there's a lot of innovation yet
to come. As exciting as this is, there's a lot
more to happen here and it has to happen.
Other gaps that need to be filled. Having said that, it becomes ubiquitous,
which means it touches everybody in your workforce.
So you have to think about the jobs, the nature of work and how it changes, how
you develop skills that go out, hire three data scientists.
You're going to have to train and educate your people across the entire
enterprise. And the last one, I would think Exxon to
think about it. I would think that's culture.
Culture is so, so important. You need to adopt ethical principles for
a. We see the issues today for companies
that haven't done that. You need to be trusted in this space if
you're an enterprise. But there are the things that management
system thinking about learning of your employee base and the impact to them and
your culture. One of the issues, I suspect, is
productivity. I mean, a guy, a general of a guy has
the potential at least to really increase the productivity of a company
is something that we're always looking for.
How do you make sure that you take advantage of that as a CEO without
letting it go too far? Well, that's exactly the point.
You know, it's fundamentally what you need to do is I would say you need to
think about the technology as a complement to what's going on today.
So therefore, your knowledge worker can become an expert, not just an average
knowledge worker or a teacher can become an expert teacher, not just a
participant in teaching grammar or language, whatever happens to be.
So if you think about it that way, is that how do you complement the
technology with the actual the the that the worker, the knowledge worker in your
organization? I think if you do that, you won't have
all the chaos that occurred historically.
I mean, chaos is OK. We learned I mean, so there's nothing
wrong with learning. But let's take the learnings of the past
and try to avoid those as we get into the future here.
Sam, what is the role, if any, of the government all this.
There's a lot of what regulation we already saw China come out with a draft
set of regulations, basically saying that whatever you do is generous.
It's got to be consistent with our values, which is all the censorship that
comes with that. So when it comes to U.S.
government, Europe, India, what is the constructive role the government in in
really directing A.I. in constructive ways?
Well, I think government does have a role and we see what happens when
governments like to get ahead of these kinds of issues.
You see that today with the social media companies and the issues around data and
data privacy. So there's clearly a role.
But the challenges, as we know and was we've learned these regulations and
stent standards have to be global. I mean, standards will emerge over time
that are global. That takes a long time.
So in the interim, what does a regulator do?
And that's laid out the problem. That's where it gets complicated because
there's different systems. Of course, the Chinese control system is
the open system of the United States and let's say some of the best, but then
Europe somewhere in between. So how do you get global regulation
that's consistent? And to do this regionally just won't
work. It won't work because fundamentally
these platforms are global. By definition, they're open source
software by definition. So I know regions think they can take
control, but the technology moves so fast, they really, really struggle in
doing so. Unless you completely shut the place
down and you walled off one that has economic implications.
So to me, the question is in the interim, what do you do?
And I think there's a role here for business leaders and companies.
I think business leaders and companies can show the way they could establish
the guardrails, the principles, ethical transparency and implement this
themselves. And finally, Sam, this week we had some
of the biggest tech companies reporting earnings.
And almost all the discussion was really about A.I.
and generative A.I. and its potential.
And there are people in the street, you know this.
Who are saying maybe this will give a new impetus to the tech sector
generally. It had been such a growth sector for so
long that it was waning just a little bit in the growth.
Now this here was a whole new wave. Do you think they're right?
Well, it's definitely going to be a huge growth in innovation opportunities.
There's no doubt about it. The question, though, David, is who
emerges as the winner here? So I'll take you back a little bit in
history. You say 50 years in the tech industry.
It's interesting. You see these patterns that who emerges
as the winner take client server to cloud Jihye Lee.
Microsoft was the winner with Intel, the technology provider and client server.
Who's been the winner. There's no doubt Amazon is the winner.
Let's go to the current world called hyper scholars and large data model
companies, social media. We know who the winners have been.
Obviously, the Facebook. It's the Googles.
It's the apples of the world have done very, very well in this environment.
Who's going to emerge in the future? That's the question.
I mean, because some of these things can be disruptive to the business models,
especially to things like advertising and search.
You could potentially be disruptive. At the same time, a lot of these issues
that still exist that need to be resolved as far as the let's call it the
governance of the data, the transparency of the data, the issues around the fact
that there's bias and that needs to be addressed.
All that has to happen, the scale required to run these models, they use
case for a large language model literally to get one use case is one
hundred million dollars of infrastructure.
I mean, that's not going to happen. It's almost like semiconductors.
And so this will all have to be addressed.
There's tremendous opportunities. I think really the question for our
colleagues, especially from the investor perspective, is who's going to win and
where do you place your bets?