- At the Viva Tech conference in Paris on Wednesday, Amazon’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels and James Manica, Google’s senior vice president of technology and society, spoke about the huge potential that AI can bring to economies and communities.
- The comments arrive just one day after the EU approved the AI Act, a landmark law that sets out comprehensive rules governing artificial intelligence.
- Big U.S. tech companies are seeking to win the support of regulators as they face criticism that their massive operations hurt smaller businesses in sectors from advertising to retail to media production.
PARIS, France — Leading U.S. technology companies this week touted the benefits of artificial intelligence to humanity at one of Europe’s biggest industry events, highlighting its appeal as regulators work globally to curb technology-related harm. appealed.
At the Viva Tech conference in Paris on Wednesday, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels and Google’s Senior Vice President of Technology and Society James Manyika spoke about the huge potential that AI brings to economies and communities. .
Notably, their comments come at a time when the EU’s AI Act, the world’s first major law regulating AI, was finally approved. Regulators are trying to curb harm and abuse of AI technology, including misinformation and copyright abuse.
Meanwhile, European Commission Commissioner Thierry Breton, a key architect of regulations surrounding big technology companies, is scheduled to speak later this week.
Vogels, who is tasked with driving innovation within Amazon, said AI can be used to “solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.”
He said AI has the potential to make businesses across all sectors more successful, but “at the same time, we need to use this technology responsibly to solve some of the world’s toughest problems.”
Vogels said it’s important to talk about “AI in the moment,” or in other words, how the technology can currently benefit people around the world.
He gave the example of how AI is being used to connect small-scale rice farmers with financial services in Jakarta, Indonesia. AI could also be used to create a more efficient supply chain for rice, which he calls the “most important staple food,” as 50% of people on the planet depend on it as their main food source. There is.
Manika, who oversees efforts across Google and Alphabet on responsible innovation, said AI could have huge benefits from a health and biotech perspective.
He said the company’s recently announced version of Google’s Gemini AI model is customized for medical use and can understand context relevant to the medical field.
Google DeepMind, the company’s main AI research division, also released a new version of its AlphaFold 3 AI model that can understand “not just proteins but all molecules of life,” making the technology available to researchers.
Manica also touched on innovations the company announced at the recent Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., including AI-generated text and previously announced new “watermarking” technology for identifying images and audio.
Manica said Google has open-sourced its watermarking technology so any developer can “build on it and improve it.”
“I think this is going to take an effort from all of us. Concerns about misinformation are important, especially this is a year where a billion people will vote around the world,” Manica said. “These are some of the things we need to focus on.”
Manyika also emphasized that much of Google’s innovation comes from engineers based in France, and that the company is committed to sourcing much of its innovation from within the European Union.
He said Google’s recently announced lightweight open source model, Gemma AI, was developed intensively at the US internet giant’s French technology base.
EU regulators set global rules
Manica’s comments came just a day after the EU approved the AI Bill, a landmark piece of legislation that sets out comprehensive rules governing artificial intelligence.
The AI Act applies a risk-based approach to artificial intelligence. This means that different applications of the technology are treated differently depending on the perceived threat they pose.
“Sometimes I worry that our narrative is so focused on risk,” Manika says. “Risks are very important, but you also have to think about why you’re developing this technology.”
“Every single developer in this room is thinking about how to improve society, how to build a business, how to do something imaginative and innovative that solves some of the world’s problems.”
He said Google is committed to balancing innovation with “being responsible” and “does this harm people in some way or benefit people in some way, and how do we do those things?” He said he is “considering whether to continue research.”
Big U.S. technology companies seek regulatory support as they face criticism that their massive operations are harming small and medium-sized businesses in sectors ranging from advertising to retail to media production. I am striving to do so.
Specifically, with the advent of AI, Big Tech’s opponents believe that new advanced generative AI systems will harm jobs, misuse copyrighted material for training data, and generate false information and harmful content. We are concerned about the growing threat of
Friends in High Places
Big technology companies have been trying to win support from French authorities.
Last week, at the “Choose France” foreign investment summit, Microsoft and Amazon signed a commitment to invest a combined €5.2 billion ($5.6 billion) in cloud and AI infrastructure and jobs in France.
This week, French President Emmanuel Macron met at the Elysée Palace with technology leaders including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and Google’s Manica, to make Paris a global destination. We talked about how to make it into an AI hub.
In a statement released by the Elysée and translated into English by Google Translate, Macron welcomed the leaders of various technology companies to France and thanked them for their “commitment to France by participating in VivaTech.”
Macron said he was “proud to have you here as a human resource” in the world’s AI field.
Matt Calkins, CEO of U.S. enterprise software company Appian, told CNBC that large technology companies “have a disproportionate influence on the development and deployment of AI technology.”
“I’m concerned about the possibility of monopolies emerging around big tech and AI,” he said. “As long as you anonymize privately owned data, you can train models. This is not enough.”
“We need more privacy when it comes to using personal and business data,” Calkins added.
