The ‘Optimistic Side’ of the AI Safety Debate

Anthropic, OpenAI and other so-called frontier AI companies may slow development of their models but companies deploying the technology are moving forward. They would, however, be happy with some guardrails on those models.

That’s what I took away from some of the discussions on the first day of the Leadership Institute’s WSJ Technology Council Summit yesterday.

The idea of a slowdown took hold over the weekend after one researcher who departed Anthropic and another still there said the technology was advancing so fast that humans might lose control—and AI could then kill us all. CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called for slowing the pace of development, a sentiment echoed by rivals. It remains highly uncertain whether any AI company actually will do so.

At the summit, Raj Subramaniam, FedEx’s CEO, told Alan, “We are on the optimistic side.”

Subramaniam pointed out that AI has helped FedEx grow its healthcare business by improving the predictability of its deliveries.

Vishal Talwar, the company’s chief digital and information officer and president of its FedEx Dataworks unit, added, “We both think that it’s in our hands and it’s up to us to apply for good, and I think it can do a lot of good for the society.”

Some other perspectives:

CEO Brief will have more highlights from the summit tomorrow.

Erle NortonManaging Editor, C-Suite Content

It’s not likely to happen at CVS Health, even though the pharmacy chain is awash in digital twins (about 150,000 of them) that are programmed to imitate consumers, allowing the company to conduct deep customer research quickly. At our summit, Sri Narasimhan, vice president of enterprise customer experience and insights at CVS Health, said one research task that used to take six to eight weeks now takes 20 minutes.

CVS’s agents are even “aging” so they will in theory mimic the way human preferences change over time and in response to the world. They’re “exposed to all the publicly available media and news and policies and everything else,” so they’re learning, Tilak Mandadi, CVS chief experience and technology officer, explained.

Simulation AI is evolving, too. Rather than bringing it questions, you’ll one day feed it your goals, such as a revenue target for a new product, said Joon Sung Park, CEO and co-founder of Simile, maker of the tool that CVS uses. The AI will then create a “multiverse of possibilities” and reveal the way forward.

Still, when Ben Ashwell, chair and editor for our CFO and Technology Councils, asked about chief simulations officers—which Park once predicted would become common at Fortune 500 companies—Mandadi wasn’t buying it. Remember the chief cloud officer, he said, calling that title the “dumbest thing in the world.”

He had a bigger point: Titles should be attached to results, such as a great experience, and people should be incentivized to find the appropriate tool for the desired outcomes. “The problem with associating a person with a technology is that that technology suddenly becomes a solution for everything,” he said, because their bonus depends on it.

You can watch the entire conversation below.

—Lila MacLellan

CEO Brief is written and edited by a team from The WSJ Leadership Institute: Alan Murray, president; Erle Norton, C-Suite Content managing editor; and Lila MacLellan, CEO Brief editor.

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