24.03 Liontrust Global Innovation Report - The Rise of AI 04.24 - Flipbook - Page 9
You have worked a lot on blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
Are there complementarities between blockchain and AI?
In terms of using AI within blockchains, blockchains use lots
of data and some of the security problems there come from
pushing forward predictions that have been hijacked in
some way. So if you marry the two technologies together,
you could have more reliable predictions in blockchain
and you could trust a lot more. That said, this hasn’t turned
out to be such a big problem yet, so we haven’t quite seen
the benefit of AI in blockchain yet.
When it comes to whether blockchain can help AI –
well you know, I’ve been fascinated by blockchain as a
technology for a long time and I think there remain lots
of interesting aspects to it. But after a period of time,
you have to sit back and ask ‘are the transformative
applications really there?’ ‘Is it really able to do something
that you can’t do elsewhere?’ And for blockchain, for the
most part, the answer is no.
Do companies need to be building AI capabilities internally
or, with the likes of Open AI, can they rent AI expertise off
the shelf? Will the leaders who create the most value from AI,
particularly through realising system reorganisation gains, be
doing it all in-house?
There are lots of constraints on businesses doing AI inhouse; most notably at the moment there is a lack of talent
you can secure for that purpose. The talent has gone
where the scale is and the scale is in these companies
providing the more general purpose solutions. The good
news is those seem to be progressing quite rapidly and
we’re all learning a lot as we go.
On the second part of your question, every other time
anyone has had that sort of vision, they’ve really had to
do it themselves. They’ve had to control the artchitecture.
If the architecture is running off an AI tool, this has to be
superior, which means the chances are you will have to do
this yourself. That said, Uber rearchitected its industry, and
it didn’t have to control the phones or even the navigation
software to do so. But I feel such cases are rare beasts.
Ultimately, time will tell. Certainly, for most businesses, off
the shelf is really the only option. But there is so much
opportunity to use off-the-shelf AI, that it is not too bad.
Finally, you have studied lots of historical technologies and
their related innovation and disruption. What is your sense of
where AI will rank in terms of its impact? Is it potentially one of
the most transformational technologies that have come along?
I think that it’s got the makings of a truly transformational
technology. What I like is just how widespread and
diverse the potential applications are. It is very wide and
the opportunities are all over the place.
Is there some limit technically that we might hit before
we can do all these marvellous things? Of course, that’s
something we don’t know. There have been plenty of other
technologies like blockchain, drones and 3D printing
that just didn’t technically perform well enough to be
transformational. But we are in a great upswing with AI
and I’m pretty optimistic about it.
The rise of AI: Technology and Innovation Report - 9
