What’s Happening with AI Right Now?

August 6, 2024

In this episode, our hosts, former Tennessee Governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam, speak with Michael Kratsios, former Chief Technology Officer of the United States, about the most compelling use cases for AI, and if Ai has been as disruptive as we thought it might be a year ago.

Nearly a year after the first You Might Be Right episode on artificial intelligence, “How Will AI Impact Democracy?” our hosts, former Tennessee Governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam, revisit AI technology and how it is evolving. Is America doing what we need to do to be the global leader in the technology of tomorrow?

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“Everyone’s kind of been educated up a bit”

Kratsios opened the conversation by describing recent developments in AI, noting that the release of ChatGPT led to a “dramatic revolution” in the consumer use of the technology as Americans were able to personally experience and interact with it for the first time.

That change sparked a shift in how legislators and regulators are thinking about the issue, Kratsios said. “When this first started, there was this big swing in at least the policy landscape for a lot of the legislative community to be interested in these big, bold ideas about maybe new, large regulatory agencies that could oversee AI,” he explained.

“What’s been amazing to watch over time is that more and more that legislators start to digest what this technology was about, the tone has changed a little bit, and we’re starting to see much more bipartisan focus on more use-case, sector-specific approaches to regulating AI,” he added. “So, I think everyone’s kind of been educated up a bit, but the technology is still dramatically improving.”

“It’s critical that we put the country in a position where we continue to lead the world”

Kratsios applauded the “truly bipartisan” nature of AI policy work in recent years. “This handover from one administration to the next over three successive administrations has been pretty powerful to watch,” he told the governors.

He also emphasized how critical it is for that bipartisan work to continue, citing two main reasons. The first: AI technology is an issue that will truly impact every American. “In some ways, there are very few issues that sort of rise to that level,” Kratsios said. “So, it’s important that solutions are found where collectively Americans are comfortable with this technology.”

The second: the need to stay ahead of both our adversaries and many of our allies who are trying to catch up with the U.S. “It’s critical that we put the country in a position where we continue to lead the world,” he said.

“What is the data that you have that no one else has?”

How can businesses, regardless of their industry, think about using AI to their competitive advantage? Kratsios, who currently serves as the Managing Director of Scale AI, an AI company focused on data used to train large language models, described AI technologies as “tools which can allow an individual to essentially turbocharge themselves to be able to allow them to do their job better, safer, faster, more effectively.”

He pointed to two specific areas where companies may be able to find an early competitive advantage. The first: marketing and advertising, in part because AI allows you to “spin up new ideas at a very, very fast velocity.” The second area he highlighted: data.

“The most valuable thing, I believe, for most businesses going forward is the proprietary data that they have,” he said. “These language models are trained on public data, on things you can scrape from the internet, but if you’re a company that has specific data around a particular industry or particular customer set that only you have, that data is super valuable. So, you can point that model at your data and be able to extract information and value from that that no one else can…I think it all goes back to doing a data analysis for your firm and seeing what is the data that you have that no one else has?”

“Just get to running on what’s already out there”

On a more individual basis, Kratsios recommended that small business owners seeking to take advantage of AI empower their employees to experiment with one of the free public large language models available now to use.

“I would ask that my employees or folks on my team take it for a spin for a couple of weeks, try to figure out where it could be valuable in their workflow, where there are places where having it up on their screen next to what they’re doing could make them more productive or make their job easier, and then come back to me with how they experienced it,” he said. “To me, that’s like a really good start, and that will go a pretty long way… the key thing is just get to running on what’s already out there and see what works and where you’re using it.”