Alibaba’s outgoing CEO discusses AI’s risks and benefits with Nobel laureates at digital economy summit
- In a dialogue with Nobel economics laureates, Zhang says he expects AI to move society forward, but also create ethical issues
- A Stanford University researcher expects around 60 per cent of the workforce in the US, China and Europe to be impacted by AI
In a dialogue with Nobel economics laureates Thomas Sargent, Christopher Pissarides and Eric Maskin, Zhang shared his views on the promise of AI, which has become a key focus of Alibaba’s cloud computing unit, as it works to integrate its own large language model (LLM) into various company products.
“We’re in a fast-changing world where we have proved that foundation models work,” Zhang said, referring to AI systems that are trained on vast amounts of data. “This will generate new industries or new services that we’ve never seen, and I think this makes the whole society move forward.”
But Zhang also voiced concerns about ethical issues stemming from the emergence of cutting-edge technologies.
“Now that machines can be fed with data from the public domain, how do we know where the original information and knowledge come from? How can they be respected? This is just one example of issues that worry me a lot,” he said.
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Zhang was speaking at a two-day event hosted by Luohan Academy, an open think tank founded in 2018 by Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post.