Use AI, or Become Irrelevant

Published in NRC Handelsblad, leading national newspaper of the Netherlands, on 29 November 2024 online

ChatGPT is celebrating its birthday, and there is much discussion about when artificial intelligence will reach human levels of intelligence, and whether that is a bad thing. According to Jeroen van Gennep, the development is unstoppable and should be fully embraced.

©Sergio Flores

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s and the world’s most famous generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is exactly, and only just, two years old. With 200 million weekly users, the natural language processing (NLP) chatbot is a helping hand or increasingly a replacement that does the work that many can no longer do without. Not only for students but also companies worldwide. In all segments: from sales to production to HR, in every industry: from shipping to banks and insurers to green energy manufacturers. And from the smallest startups to the largest multinationals, they are looking at how they can, or even must, innovate using GenAI. 

Doing nothing would be akin to a horse-and-carriage taxi firm in New York City in the year 1900 and not wanting to see that the arrival of the automobile has an impact on their business operations. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were more than 130,000 working horses in Manhattan. Ten years later, this number had already fallen by more than 30% and by 1925, the innovation of motorised vehicles had led to a 97% reduction in the number of working horses in the metropolis.

Not only had the horse-drawn taxi been wiped out, but a large part of the economy: from blacksmiths, carriage builders, horse feed suppliers and stables saw the economic demand for their goods and services drastically reduced.

AI is more than just a chatbot that helps a consumer buy a plane ticket, and a student solve math equations or write an essay for history class. AI systems are already assisting businesses in analysing and understanding the root causes of business anomalies and in production chains to increase productivity, for example of wind turbines.

The internal combustion engine was versatile and all-encompassing in its impact on our society, not only faster transport from A to B, but revolutionary in generating energy and far-reaching developments in agriculture. The impact of AI innovation on our society over the next 10 to 30 years promises to be a multiple of that of the combustion engine.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, makes it clear that his ultimate goal is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an artificial system with the same level of cognitive capabilities as humans.

The AI ​​world is divided between those who think AGI will never happen, those who think it might happen but only very far in the future, and those who think it might happen in the coming years. Within that division around the if and when, there is greater disagreement over its impact. Will AGI be a positive innovation or is it the greatest risk to life on Earth that has ever existed?

But while that debate rages on, thousands of companies are innovating on two sides: those who develop the AI ​​systems, and the thousands of companies worldwide who use these AI systems and implement them in their business operations.

The developments are already taking place in every segment of the business world and the stakes are high: not applying AI and one risks the survival of their company, innovate with AI and one is offered hope to flourish in the new future as well as gaining a direct positive impact in the applied application.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and especially AGI, offers hope to solve climate change, an end to world hunger, to evaporate the need for migration, as well as to reduce the ever-increasing problem of an aging population and the rising costs of healthcare. From an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance.

Is it all too good to be true? Perhaps, but for many, if not all, of these problems we know that the solution lies in better insights from more knowledge, thinking differently and working more effectively together. It is precisely in this endeavour where AI offers hope.

Just as it was AI that made it possible to accurately predict the protein sequences for 99% of the 227 million known proteins. Before Google’s AI research lab DeepMind came up with AlphaFold, less than 0.1% of protein sequences were known.

This breakthrough in biochemistry is invaluable in accelerating the development of cancer, Alzheimer’s and other treatments. A milestone for which this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of DeepMind. AlphaFold achieved this innovation by working in ways and at speeds that we as humans simply cannot. Horsepower was the universal unit of power of the 20th century. The power gauge of the 21st century is computing power.

The continued innovation of AI offers hope that by generating new insights, it will help us find solutions to humanity’s critical issues and ensure prosperity in all regions of the world.

Let’s again make innovation the cornerstone of our economy.

To apply Churchill’s quote about private enterprise to innovation, “some see innovation as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon”.