- At the Viva Tech conference in Paris on Wednesday, Werner Vogels, Amazon's chief technology officer, and James Manica, Google's senior vice president of technology and society, spoke about what AI will bring to the economy and communities. He talked about great possibilities.
- The 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.
- Big U.S. tech companies have faced criticism that their giant operations harm smaller businesses in sectors ranging from advertising to retail to media production and are seeking to win the support of regulators.
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 James Manyika, Google's senior vice president of technology and society, spoke about the huge potential that AI can bring to economies and communities.
It is notable that their comments come as the EU's AI law, the world's first major piece of legislation governing AI, has been given the final green light, as regulators seek to curb harm and misuse of the technology, including misinformation and copyright abuse.
Meanwhile, European Commissioner Thierry Breton, the lead architect of regulation of big tech companies, is due 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 toughest problems.”
He said AI has the potential to make all kinds of businesses successful, but “at the same time, we need to use some of this technology responsibly to solve some of the world's toughest problems.” “There is,” he said.
Vogels said it was important to talk about “AI in the here and now” – how the technology can benefit people around the world right now.
He gave the example of AI being used to connect small rice farmers to financial services in Jakarta, Indonesia, and could also be used to create more efficient supply chains for rice, which he called “the most important staple food,” with 50 percent of the world's people relying on it as their primary food source.
Manyika, who heads Google and Alphabet's responsible innovation efforts, said AI could have huge benefits from a health and biotech perspective.
He said the company's recently released version of Google's Gemini AI model is customized for medical use and can understand context relevant to the medical field.
Google DeepMind, the main arm of the company's AI efforts, also released a new version of its AlphaFold 3 AI model that can understand “all the molecules of life, not just proteins,” saying it has made the technology available to researchers. Ta.
Manica also mentioned innovations the company announced at the recent Google I/O event in Mountain View, California. This includes AI-generated text, as well as new “watermarking” technology the company previously announced for identifying images and audio.
Manyika said that because Google has open sourced its watermarking technology, 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 introduced lightweight, open-source model, Gemma AI, was significantly developed at the US internet giant's French tech base.
EU regulators set global rules
Manica's comments arrive just one day after the EU approved the AI Act, a landmark law that sets out comprehensive rules governing artificial intelligence.
The AI Act applies a risk-based approach to artificial intelligence, which means that different applications of the technology are treated differently depending on the threats they are perceived to 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 “responsibility” and is committed to “being thoughtful about whether this is going to harm people in some way, whether this is going to benefit people in some way, and how we continue to research these things.”
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 tech companies are trying to curry favor with French authorities.
Last week, at the “Choose France” foreign investment summit, Microsoft and Amazon signed an agreement to invest a combined 5.2 billion euros ($5.6 billion) in cloud and AI infrastructure and jobs in France.
This week, French President Emmanuel Macron met with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and Google's Manika at the Elysée Palace, among other technology leaders. We discussed how to make it a global 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.”
“I am proud to welcome you all here as talent” in the global AI field, Macron said.
Matt Calkins, CEO of US enterprise software company Appian, told CNBC that big tech companies have “a disproportionate influence over the development and deployment of AI technologies”.
“I'm concerned about the potential for monopolies to emerge around big tech companies and AI,” he said. “They can train models using privately owned data, but they just anonymize that data. That's not enough.”
“When you're using personal data or corporate data, you need more privacy protections than this,” Calkins added.
