German Gref: “We tried to organize a discussion about the AGI, and not a single self-respecting scientist came to it”

Yesterday, February 18, a public lecture by the head of Sberbank German Gref and the director general of Cognitive Pilot Olga Uskova on the topic “Neuroevolution. How to live and keep up with the new realities: HUMAN + AI . ”

The speakers promised to speak on a wide range of issues: what to expect from the development of technologies in the near future, whether you really need to be afraid of AI, give examples of achieving technological leadership, identify the AI ​​models used by market leaders and the competencies that a person needs for a comfortable and effective interaction with artificial intelligence.

Do not be fooled.



Here are some quotes from a speech by German Oskarovich:

About dopamine alcoholics:

Today there is no problem of excess free time. When we come to the conclusion that we have a lot of time available — we only have 24 hours in a day, of which 8 hours, I hope we will sleep — we cannot imagine how many options for self-development will appear. Because self-development is ultimately happiness. This is a process, it is a flow. If a person stops in his development, what kind of happiness are we talking about? Happiness is not the final process, it is a process of self-development. We are all dopamine alcoholics - this very dopamine will have to be caught after development. It is necessary to free man's time from unproductive activities. You do not need monkey labor, you need to give a person the opportunity and time for self-development. Let's work onto free up a person’s time and give him the opportunity at this time to feel happy in the process of developing his favorite activities.



About healthy sound sleep

Now we are more and more starting to talk about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence - universal artificial intelligence). We have an AI Journey conference where all the time we tried to organize a discussion about AGI. And not a single self-respecting scientist came to her: “You can discuss this in the kitchen, but we are not ready to discuss this in public.” The topic was not resolved by intelligent scientists. Science fiction, journalists, someone else - yes, but not serious people. This year there was a scrapping - the topic has become the top. We organized a huge section on our AI Journey, where the top people who discussed the AGI came. And this, of course, is a new round in the development of artificial intelligence. But for now you can sleep peacefully, there is nothing to be afraid of.



About AI-first

Artificial intelligence is an exclusively applied technology, and this distinguishes it from many other technologies. We see that the technology has not exhausted itself in applied applications. We say in Sberbank that we do not have a single product in which there is no AI. For ourselves, we have long determined what the AI-first concept is. Two years ago, the president of Google said: "We are moving away from the concept of mobile-first, now we have the concept of AI-first." We have determined for ourselves that this AI is in our every process, not only in each of our products.



About the scale of change and fear as a driver

As Vernor Vinge said: “We are on the verge of changes corresponding to those changes that were at the time of the birth of life on Earth.” Strongly said, but in fact I think that we, who are sitting on this stage, and you, who are interested in this topic, subconsciously come to this kind of communication, because you feel that there is something behind this that we do not fully can understand and realize. Therefore, we often have a fear of the unknown. Fear is, on the one hand, a good feeling: it makes someone stop, but it strongly drives scientists and researchers to move forward, to understand what is behind it.



In general, a lot of interesting things were said yesterday, and we thought that this could also be interesting to the Habrachians.

Here is a video of the lecture. Watch, listen, discuss.