Exclusive: The AI race is "anybody's game," Box CEO Aaron Levie says
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Box CEO Aaron Levie at Axios' AI+ Summit in San Francisco, Calif. on Dec. 4, 20205. Photo: Chris Constantine on behalf of Axios.
The race to create the best AI model over the next five years is "anybody's game," Box cofounder and CEO Aaron Levie said Tuesday at Axios' AI+ Summit in San Fransisco.
The big picture: Levie said it's impossible to rank AI models as they currently exist because breakthroughs are happening every single day.
- He added that incremental improvements in today's systems may be irrelevant years from now as technology rapidly advances — but they matter today as every person and company searches for some advantage in how they implement AI.
- "The great thing from just a user of these technologies, whether as an end user or a developer, is you have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital expense, capital expenditure and R&D going into technology that you get to use instantaneously," Levie said.
Context: AI Model CEOs are feeling the pressure to refine their systems as investments and capabilities grow. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a "code red surge" Monday, encouraging employees to quickly improve ChatGPT as other AI rivals like Google's Gemini compete on an entirely different level.
- But while some may be worrying about AI leading to job destruction, Levie said he believes AI will follow a similar arc to other technologies in the past, consistently improving tools to complete a "higher order of work than before."
- He also noted that AI technology has limitations and requires human oversight to improve, which he doesn't think will disappear any time soon.
- "I don't think the world has enough engineers building software for the next set of problems that are going to exist," Levie said. "So that convinces me that that you aren't going to see this sort of wholesale shift in the kind of jobs that we do."
State of play: Levie has been a major proponent of agentic AI, which inspired the launch of Box Automate this September — a system that allows AI agents and employees to work together to seamlessly customize workflow.
- Levie, whose platforms are used by about two-thirds of the Fortune 500, has said he doesn't believe AI agents will replace enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS), and instead sees future where the two work in tandem.
Go deeper: Box adds AI feature to let people ask questions of their documents
Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional details throughout.
