Organisations "throwing money" at AI, need to be more cautious: Amy Webb

Organisations around the world are racing to invest in AI to ensure they don’t miss out on the opportunities.

[L-R] Amy Webb and Adam Spencer.

However, Amy Webb, futurist and CEO of the Future Technology Institute warns this comes with consequences.

Webb spoke to attendees at SXSW Sydney explaining that business leaders investing too early into AI makes her “scared”.

She said companies, investors and people are “throwing money” at AI.

“Tonnes of startups that were not doing very well are suddenly dot AI. That has made me more scared than the technology itself,” she explained.

“The reason is because this much money starts flowing into something at some point everybody's going to expect commercialisation and return on investment.”

Webb said this is similar to what happened in the 1980s.

“We went through a similar period, there were these crazy promises made, the technology at the time was quite promising, but it wasn't capable of doing what everybody thought that it could do and that caused all the funding to dry up,” she said.

She said in today’s AI climate, there are many positive use cases, but leaders are not being cautious.

“The thing that concerns me is leaders are terrified of missing out on these things, they're saying ‘we're going to join with you, here's our data, train it so that we can use it’,” she said.

“Others are throwing huge piles of money at this. Nobody is taking a measured approach, being a pragmatist and making a good decision.”

Attitudes towards ChatGPT have evolved over this year from fear itself to the fear of missing out (FOMO).

Webb said she is curious about this shift in attitude over AI as she has been trying to get executives to pay attention to the technology for the “better part of 20 years”.

“The question is, why is everybody suddenly talking about something that requires a significant understanding of technology?” She said.

“The answer is because in November of 2022, OpenAI released its ChatGPT product to the world and it took a little while to catch on, but that's the genesis of what happened."