Marc Benioff, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce (CRM), argued that the government should learn from its mistakes in regulating social media companies (it hasn’t) and get in front of artificial intelligence before the technology becomes too powerful. Must come.
“I think the government really has to step it up and really offer another level of regulation,” Benioff told Yahoo Finance Live (video above) at the company’s Dreamforce conference. He acknowledged that AI technology is developing faster than the industry thinks.
Benioff has been a vocal critic of the business practices of social media companies, famously saying in 2020 that Facebook (META) is the “new cigarette”.
The government “clearly failed [on social media regulation],” Benioff said. “They get an F for social media and how they’ve handled them. We saw that game. “I hope they really step up and do the right thing in AI.”
In this photo taken Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2018, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at a SPUR luncheon in San Francisco. (Eric Risberg/AP Photo)
As it stands, AI regulation has mostly been a dog and pony show between government and tech leaders.
Just last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang and Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai were among those, Who was called to Washington to discuss artificial intelligence. ,
Musk reportedly warned about the civilizational risks posed by AI, while others in the room emphasized the opportunities with the technology.
Despite the well-publicized gathering of the industry’s elite, the timeline for AI regulation remains extremely vague. What any regulation will look like is also unclear – which means a wave of disruption is coming to businesses and society as large language models (LLMs) gain strength and widespread use.
“If AI is allowed to enter the global economy with only light regulation, the most likely outcome will be high growth, but very little in existing industries,” Jim Reed, a veteran strategist at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a new client note. There will be disruption.”
Tech investor will.i.am is concerned about the power of AI to change public perception.
“2024 is going to be a very unique time because we’re going to have a lot of different types of fraudulent agents out there, where you won’t be able to discern the truth,” the musician told Yahoo Finance Live at Dreamforce. “We’re barely dealing with fake news.”
While Big Tech awaits AI guidelines in any form from regulators, a company like Salesforce is going full steam ahead in trying to supercharge its profits by releasing new AI tools in its various lines of business.
The Williams-Sonoma (WSM) exhibit at Dreamforce gave a glimpse of how Salesforce’s AI is powering furniture recommendations. And Slack — a business Salesforce acquired for $27.7 billion in 2021 — had a booth explaining how businesses can use new AI features on the platform to create better marketing campaigns.
“The AI revolution is here,” Benioff said. There are no regulators.
brian sozzi is the executive editor of Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozy on Twitter @bryansozzi and on Linkedin, Tips on deals, mergers, active positions or anything else? Email [email protected].
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