AI AN IN-DEPTH REPORT Oregon Business: To start with, how do we define AI? I’m asking because it seems useful to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing, and also because, as a cynic, sometimes I see things marketed as AI that just don’t sound like what I understand AI to be. So how do you define it? Charles Jennings: I define it as the art and science of teaching machines — of any kind — to learn. The difference between AI and everything that’s come before it is that AIs continue to learn and grow, and they feed on data in a completely unique way. And they are growing at a rate that most people don’t understand or comprehend. K S Venkatraman: Artificial intelligence has been around for more than 75 years starting with the Turing Machine. Since then, we’ve had machine learning, which is more learning from patterns of data to predict future behavior. Over the last decade or so, we’ve had this rise of accelerated computing coupled with the availability of large amounts of data. That combination has led to a field of AI called deep learning, which is really mimicking neural networks in our brain. Now we sit at the cusp of this exponential curve with generative AI, and that has led to computers being superhuman in vision and language domains, with many more things to come. Because of this explosion, every economic sector is scrambling to figure out how to incorporate AI into their businesses, so there is an enormous need for skill development — or at least learning how to use these AI models responsibly and basic foundational skills. OB: What should business leaders be considering as they’re thinking about, “How do I incorporate AI in what I do?” I realize that so much is going to vary depending on your sector. But what are the big things that people should be thinking about both in terms of the business case and the ethics? Jennings: I think 2024 will be a big year for the vertical industry AI. I think virtually every vertical from agriculture to zookeeping is going to have some kind of AI disruption. Two weeks ago, I was talking with the CFO of a big construction company. They’ve got a really sophisticated AI application for bidding on big construction projects. I think he said they had 10 human bidders in their company previously; they’re already down to seven. He said, “We’re never going to get to zero because there’s always the personal relationship, there’s the judgment.” They’re keeping the senior ones, and the junior ones are being eliminated. In terms of what companies should be thinking about, you’ve got to have safety and ethics very high on the list. For anybody who’s looking for guidance, I would recommend the new NIST framework. They’re doing a really good job of science and measurement “Turing machines, first described by Alan Turing in Turing 1936–7, are simple abstract computational devices intended to help investigate the extent and limitations of what can be computed. Turing’s ‘automatic machines’, as he termed them in 1936, were specifically devised for the computing of real numbers. They were first named ‘Turing machines’ by Alonzo Church in a review of Turing’s paper (Church 1937). Today, they are considered to be one of the foundational models of computability and (theoretical) computer science.” Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Charles Jennings and K S Venkatraman PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN 28
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