Value investment champion Warren Buffett, who famously avoids backing companies focused on new technologies, shared his thoughts about fast-emerging artificial intelligence tools at a shareholder gathering on Saturday. And the “Oracle of Omaha” believes there are relatively equal chances the AI-driven future could be a delight or a disaster.
Buffett’s comments came at the annual investor meeting of his global holding company Berkshire Hathaway over the weekend. He noted AI’s ability to mimic individuals through faked videos and audio recordings makes it the ultimate scamming tool but hedged that concern by acknowledging the technology’s potential for positive change.
“Obviously, AI has potential for good things too, but ... I do think, as someone who doesn’t understand a damn thing about it, it has enormous potential for good and enormous potential for harm — and I just don’t know how that plays out,” Buffett said, per CNBC.
Buffett likened the current state of AI software development to the emergence of nuclear weapons technology in the mid-20th century.
“We let the genie out of the bottle when we developed nuclear weapons and that genie has been doing some terrible things lately, and the power of that genie is what scares the hell out of me,” Buffett said. “I don’t know any way to get the genie back in the bottle, and AI is somewhat similar. It’s part of the way out of the bottle, and it’s enormously important and it’s going to be done by somebody ... whether it’s going to change the future of society, we will find out later.”
AI anxiety on the rise
Concerns about the potential outcomes from increasingly powerful AI software have grown right alongside the advancement of the technology itself.
Another threat analogy pairing AI with nuclear weapons was raised last June in a single-sentence missive issued by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety that went on to earn the signatures of a wide-ranging group of distinguished scientists, academics and tech developers, including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and leaders of the major AI labs, including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement reads.
The Center for AI Safety said the statement has earned the support of a “historic coalition of AI experts” along with philosophers, ethicists, legal scholars, economists, physicists, political scientists, pandemic scientists, nuclear scientists and climate scientists who believe establishing the risk of extinction from advanced, future AI systems is now one of the world’s most important problems.
Hinton is a particularly notable signatory as a scientist whose research laid the groundwork for emerging artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Bard and others. But the British Canadian researcher ended his decadelong stint working for Google in March 2023, citing concerns over the dangers posed by AI advancements.
In an interview just months after he left Google, the man frequently referred to as the “Godfather of AI” shared some insights on his concerns about emerging AI systems.
“They’ll be master manipulators because they’ll have learned that from us by reading everything on the web,” Hinton told The World. “Will they have their own goals and want to manipulate people to achieve their own goals or will we somehow be able to control them to help us?
“How do you control something that’s more intelligent than you? It’s very, very difficult to do that.”
Investors counting on AI’s upside
Rising anxieties about potentially catastrophic outcomes, however, have not tempered investor interest in companies working to advance AI’s capabilities.
Last August, Goldman Sachs analysts projected global investment in AI, which hit nearly $92 billion in 2022, could be approaching $200 billion worldwide by 2025.
In his widely watched annual letter to investors released last month, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon outlined the transformative impacts AI is having on the the banking giant’s operations, currently the largest U.S. bank by assets with around $3.4 trillion under management, a figure that also places it as the fifth largest bank in the world.
“We have been actively using predictive AI and ML for years — and now have over 400 use cases in production in areas such as marketing, fraud and risk — and they are increasingly driving real business value across our businesses and functions,” Dimon wrote. “We’re also exploring the potential that generative AI (GenAI) can unlock across a range of domains, most notably in software engineering, customer service and operations, as well as in general employee productivity.”
In an interview last August, JPMorgan Chase chief operating officer Daniel Pinto said the firm has plans to invest $1 billion or more per year in artificial intelligence. In his communique to investors, Dimon said the technology is poised to drive extraordinary changes and could even match the impacts of some of the biggest technological benchmarks in history.
“While we do not know the full effect or the precise rate at which AI will change our business — or how it will affect society at large — we are completely convinced the consequences will be extraordinary and possibly as transformational as some of the major technological inventions of the past several hundred years: Think the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, computing and the Internet, among others,” Dimon wrote.