Axios House at the World Economic Forum 2024: Building AI with Better Data
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
White House OSTP's Arati Prabhakar on the Axios stage. Credit: Dani Ammann Photography on behalf of Axios
The big picture: Axios House hosted an afternoon reception as part of a week of event programming held during the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. On Monday, January 15, Axios managing editor Alison Snyder and Axios podcast '1 big thing' host and editor Niala Boodhoo hosted conversations with White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) director Arati Prabhakar and Schneider Electric CEO Peter Herweck on how to reduce instances of bias and misinformation in AI-powered tools.
The details: Arati Prabhakar and Peter Herweck both explained how there is a need to acknowledge and focus on the human elements of AI models and data security.
- "When we talk about artificial intelligence, we tend to talk about it as a technology. But the first thing to realize is that people choose what AI models to build. They train it on data. Often it's data that's about or created by human beings, and then they choose what applications to build, and then other people choose how to use those AI models and what to do with them," Prabhakar said. "So I think if we're going to get to this future which we have to get to with better AI, we have to start by understanding that it's a socio-technical system, it's not just a technology by itself."
- "Technology can do so much, but usually the weakest point in the whole security chain is the person. So it is important to deploy a little bit of 'HI', human intelligence, to it," Herweck said. "It needs to start pretty high in the organization because these things need to be driven, you know, people need to be trained."
Sponsored content:
In a View From the Top sponsored segment, Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian emphasized the importance of questioning the sources that create AI outputs to ensure integrity.
- "I want to see more investments, more companies that are looking to interrogate the outputs that our AI gods are putting out. Unfortunately if we don't interrogate the sources of truth and go to the first order, unfortunately we're going to continue to be disappointed and potentially even worse have catastrophic outcomes if we actually aren't building things with high integrity."
Thank you to Gecko Robotics for sponsoring this event.
