PART ICURIOUS ABOUT … AI
Why Am I Curious About AI?
I’ve been fascinated by AI for a number of years, but was never able to really get my head around how it mattered to me personally. I was comfortable talking about AI, but not being an AI programmer; I wasn’t able to easily build my own AI tools and models.
Until ChatGPT burst onto the stage on 30 November 2022, the whole concept of AI and its uses seemed quite far off. My view of AI, pre-ChatGPT, was that large companies would invest a lot of time in training such platforms for specific roles.
This had been borne out in my time at IBM, where the legacy of the 2011 Jeopardy! win was omnipresent. For those who don’t remember this feat, the IBM computer (Watson) beat two Jeopardy! champions.1 In 2013, the then-CEO Ginni Rometty announced a new commercial division – IBM Watson. This was when I knew that we were on the cusp of something really interesting.
Back in the Watson days, the promise of AI was possibly overstated by IBM and a number of other vendors. This was all pre-GenAI, so the more traditional machine learning and deep learning techniques were much harder to observe in action.
In an interview with Goldman Sachs after she had left IBM, Rometty commented that, “when making a market, people have to trust the technology”.2 At the time, Rometty tasked the IBM Watson team to focus on oncology, one of the most challenging and ambitious areas to apply AI.
At IBM, I was a Global Managing Partner in the consulting group, and ...
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