Technology and communication Miss the Summer of AI virtual event series? Watch the replays.

If you missed the live webinars, you can catch up on what the experts are saying about AI by reading key highlights and watching the replays at the links below.

Part 1: Origins of AI featuring Dr. Jules White, Associate Dean for Strategic Learning Programs and Associate Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University.

• White: I asked [ChatGPT] to create a meal plan that combines food from Uzbekistan and Ethiopia, but at the same time is keto and fits within 2000 calories. This is not an easy thing to do, right? If I had to go and do this myself, it would take a lot of work….I thought that maybe I could create some stories [about Pokémon] that would make [my son] excited to try the food…And so [ChatGPT] creates a whole battle story about this Berbere dragon that blows spicy fire across the eggs. Then it challenges my son by asking, ‘Can you help to defeat the Berbere dragon by trying this spicy breakfast?’ That’s a really complex thing to do.
• White: From a cybersecurity standpoint, it's really important that we use it defensively because if it's going to be used offensively, that's going to be a big problem. People could use it maliciously, and they will use it maliciously, but I think that if you took the tool away, they would still be doing it. The tool itself is not doing that.
• For more, click here to watch the replay.

Part 2: Investment implications and opportunities of AI featuring Kevin Dennean, CIO Technology Sector Strategist; Jeremie Capron, Partner and Director of Research, ROBO Global; and Jay Jacobs, Managing Director, US Head of Thematics and Active Equity ETFs, BlackRock

• Dennean: I like to describe AI as an overnight sensation 60 years in the making, maybe even a little bit longer. I think that there are a lot of things coming together right now that argue that we are entering the age of AI. To be clear, we've lived in almost, I'd call it, ambient AI for a number of years, with a lot of technologies that we touch every day. So I do think a lot of the gains are justified.
• Dennean: There's always a little bit of a debate about, ‘Are we in an AI bubble?’ You know, I don't think so. I think bubbles typically have three characteristics. It’s usually a bright shiny new technology innovation, it sees rapid gains in equity prices, and you reach really extreme valuations. I think we can check the first two boxes, but because the earnings revisions for companies that have strong alignment to AI have been so strong, we assume valuations are rich. But they're not.
• Jacobs: [Regarding whether AI is overhyped from an investment standpoint,] I think it's really a tale of two different types of stocks at the high end. When you look at those mega cap tech names, they have experienced a significant rally, billions of dollars of wealth creation in those year to date. As we've seen, a lot of those companies draw the investor attention from an AI perspective. But there's a long tail of 100 additional companies and beyond that are really going to benefit from AI and they are AI enablers, AI developers, and the robotics companies that benefit from AI getting better. They're users and implementers of AI. There's this incredible kind of second story with AI that I don't think the market has really picked up on yet. And so it's really about not focusing on just the top end, but who are the second order beneficiary of AI.
• For more, click here to watch the replay.

Part 3:Impact of AI on jobs, education, and the economy featuring Paul Donovan, Chief Economist, UBS, and Dr. Bruce Lenthall, Executive Director at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Pennsylvania

• Donovan: I would suggest [AI] is probably not quite on the same level as electricity or the Internet. But it is part of a bigger series of changes that we are seeing. [It’s similar to] things like social media, robotics, and automation, all of this which we encapsulate as the Fourth Industrial Revolution and I think AI is a significant part of that.
• Donovan: The changes that come out of AI, and in indeed in the broader sense of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, are really focused on improving efficiency, doing more with less, which is extremely important, not just from an economic point of view, potentially raising living standards, but from the greater climate crisis point of view. Doing more with less is absolutely what we've got to be doing over time.
• Lenthall: The biggest advocates for artificial intelligence that I talk to on our campus say that machines may be better than humans in particular tasks, but that humans working together with machines is the best of all, at least for the moment.
• For more, click here to watch the replay.

Part 4:Applications of AI featuring Sam Charrington, noted Machine Learning/AI industry analyst, and host of the TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning and AI)

• Charrington: While generative AI and technologies like ChatGPT may be currently at the peak of inflated expectations, they will eventually transition to the plateau of productivity. And so I think, yes, ChatGTP is overhyped right now. A lot of the things that people do, a lot of the capabilities that people ascribe to it, it can't actually do, some easily or some at all. But at the same time, if your time horizon is long enough, many of the usability issues currently associated with generative AI will be overcome and sufficiently solved to make it a huge productivity gain for us as businesses and individuals.
• Charrington: ChatGPT is not intelligent. It's not sentient. It doesn't have a personality. It cannot reason. But yet it can demonstrate all of these things. Why is that? Well, at its core, this is an algorithm, a mathematical model that's been trained on a ton of data. And all it knows how to do is predict a word based on your input and the words that it's already predicted. That's all it's doing. And in doing that, we've seen, anyone who's used ChatGPT has seen, it produces pretty amazing results and it's mind boggling that this actually works and that it can demonstrate what looks like reasoning.
• For more, click here to watch the replay.

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