AI is overrated: Konstantinos Sgantzos on CoinGeek Backstage

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is both overrated and underrated, says Konstantinos Sgantzos. In an interview with CoinGeek Backstage, he talked about the intersection of AI and blockchain and what the future holds for the technologies.

“Artificial intelligence is overrated because people tend to anthropomorphize their creations. We think our creations look like us. AI researchers say that large language models really understand what you’re talking about, but it’s not the case,” Sgantzos told CoinGeek Backstage host Becky Liggero.

While he acknowledged that we’re dealing with a highly advanced technology, Sgantzos says we’re years away from “what we perceive as understanding for humans.” However, It will improve and play a significant role in advancing science and technology.

Sgantzos, a lecturer at the University of Sharjah in the UAE, was one of the speakers at the IEEE COINS conference in Berlin. The event brought together experts in blockchain and AI to discuss the intersection of the two technologies and how each can leverage the other.

Blockchain solves many of the critical challenges AI faces today, Sgantzos said. One is AI bias, a challenge threatening the deployment of the technology in tasks such as hiring as it would discriminate against some candidates. Blockchain micropayments are the best way to solve AI bias, he explains.

Blockchain’s transparency would also transform AI, Sgantzos added. Currently, we can only rely on the word of Sam Altman and other pioneers that their AI models are being operated ethically.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Meta’s LLaMA 2 (NASDAQ: META), and other LLM models have, however, been found to use personal and copyrighted data to train their models without the owners’ consent. These companies are now fighting multiple lawsuits worldwide for illegal data scrapping.

“Whenever something is not transparent, then something wrong is going on,” Sgantzos says. “Blockchain technology will help everyone to have highly diverse and highly accurate data sets.”

A common question around AI is whether it will rise and take over as it gets smarter. Borrowing from famous works of art, we’ve seen how quickly advanced technology can turn against us and become self-preserving.

According to Sgantzos, AI takeover is unlikely. The technology won’t even take your job, he says.

“AI will not take our jobs. People who know how to work with AI will take our jobs.”

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