philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

HAI at Davos: Key Insights on AI From the World Economic Forum

...  James Landay: Professor of Computer Science and the Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan Professor in the School of Engineering; Co-Director, Stanford HAI

...the need for large foundation models that reflect global cultural diversity. Currently, AI models are predominantly built by U.S. companies with an emphasis on English and Western content. That creates cultural biases and even mistranslations. We need culturally and linguistically diverse training data in AI development. ...

DeepSeek was getting in people’s heads during Davos, but really, the company just used several known (and developed some new) clever optimizations for both training time and inference time compute. Now there’s a lot of skepticism over exactly how much money and how many GPUs were required, but it’s clear that they were able to train really great models much more efficiently. And now these are techniques that everyone else can use because it’s open source and in published technical reports. So that, again, leads to way more efficiency. ...

Alex (Sandy) Pentland: Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; Professor of Information Technology; Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program Director, MIT Management Sloan School; Center Fellow, Stanford HAI; Faculty Lead of Digital Platforms and Society at the Digital Economy Lab

... People seemed to be girding themselves for challenges — geopolitical tensions, tariff wars, real wars, climate disasters — by a change in focus from idealistic goals and dreams to making social systems work and social contracts sustainable. ...

A major theme I think is emerging is what you might call the third way: not the US-EU, not China, but the way of India, Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Indopacific. These are middle income countries, no longer poor, and with sophisticated technical populations, and they are busy deploying digital technologies everywhere, including all but the most cutting-edge AI. ...

Erik Brynjolfsson: Director, Stanford Digital Economy Lab; Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow, Stanford HAI; Ralph Landau Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research 

... I think it's a healthy pivot to start focusing more on identifying the specific tasks where AI can be helpful. Ultimately that will lead not only to more business value, but also to more productivity, better healthcare, a cleaner environment, and a more prosperous society.

See the full post here: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/hai-davos-key-insights-ai-world-economic-forum