More businesses aiming to use AI to boost revenue, productivity, as concerns remain over accuracy, regulation

SAN FRANCISCO: The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has made it a major priority for a growing number of businesses.

While it has ushered in a new era of innovation, questions have also arisen over how to regulate the technology.

Last month, thousands of the world’s data, analytics and AI professionals gathered at the Databricks Data and AI Summit in San Francisco to discuss current topics in the field.

Among the discussions was the topic of how businesses can harness the power of AI moving forward.

FUTURE PLANS

Organisations of all sizes are looking at how to put AI at the centre of their plans for the future.

Mr Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, told CNA his firm forecasts that in the next five to 10 years, every company across every industry is going to be a data and AI company.

“And what you mean by that is that the winner in every industry will be a company that's winning because they have such amazing data processing capabilities and AI capabilities,” he explained.

Just before its annual summit, Databricks announced that it had purchased MosaicML, a competitor to ChatGPT developer OpenAI, for US$1.3 billion.

Many of the organisations at the summit shared notes about how they use AI to make their work more efficient, with a crucial part being how to best manage and use the data they own.

One approach is to train their own large language models, which form the backbone of generative AI similar to the likes of ChatGPT, but with data sources from within an organisation itself.

Such an approach has already made its way into professional sports such as baseball, where teams constantly collect video and other data sources. 

Mr Alexander Booth, assistant director of research and development at Major League Baseball team Texas Rangers, told CNA: “We have 12 cameras set up in the ballpark that are all using computer vision models to create a rendering and skeleton of all the players.”

This lets the team understand exactly how each player moves, how they are throwing the ball, and how they swing their bats at the ball, he said.

“And from there we can use artificial intelligence to predict the likelihood of injuries,” added Mr Booth.

CHALLENGES REMAIN

Businesses hope that the emerging tools and technology will bring significantly better performance and more revenue.

But big challenges remain, including ensuring the accuracy of the large language models.

A New York lawyer, for instance, recently found himself in hot water after using ChatGPT to research a case.

“ChatGPT made stuff up … so it created court cases or created precedents that never existed and he lost the case,” said Mr David Mariani, CEO and co-founder of AtScale.

Regulation is another question mark, as governments weigh concerns over issues such as AI being used to spread misinformation or commit crimes.