Mint DIS 2023 | ‘Generative AI giving rise to era of polymaths’

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) as the biggest area of interest in technology worldwide is giving rise to an era of polymaths, said panelists at Mint Digital Innovation Summit 2023 on 9 June. Speaking at the event, Jayanth N Kolla, co-founder and partner at consultancy firm Convergence Catalyst said, “I believe every technology has created jobs. But with AI and Generative AI, I think we are seeing the onset of the era of polymaths. So, if you're a polymath, you're going to be a winner for sure.”

Prateek Dixit, co-founder and chief technology officer of audio streaming platform Pocket FM, added that employees who access and use AI tools in their regular affairs “will do far better than employees without AI”.

“With every technological innovation, we have seen skills grow, and the skill gap keeps getting decreased. With this as well, we feel that because the knowledge is available to anyone, the skill gap could be reduced and the mundane jobs, frankly, will disappear. But then, obviously, some better jobs will be created,” he said.

Dixit detailed the impact of generative AI on content generation, and what changed in this sector after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot that became the fastest ever platform to reach 100 million users worldwide.

“We work on all native Indian languages, and use language translation, but generative AI has helped us to conduct localisation as well. For example, if a story in Hindi has been developed according to a north-Indian setup, and the writer wants to launch this story in Kannada, the story not just needs to be translated, but also be localised to that specific setting as well. So, while we are using translations as before, post the advent of ChatGPT, we’ve been using localised stories and building on top of what OpenAI has provided with its fundamental AI models,” Dixit detailed.

While generative AI is leading innovations in companies, Kolla cautioned that there will be a long route to achieving policies and regulations in order to construct industries and how they use tools such as ChatGPT.

“After almost 30 years, we still don't have any solid regulation or policy to police the internet. Companies like Google have security policies on data privacy and the use of the internet. Even in generative AI, there will be leading companies who will work to setting policies in place,” he said.

Kolla added that while we have to “learn from the past”, with generative AI, “the potential for innovation, doing good, and connecting disparate thoughts and deriving value is huge.”

“A lot of energy and resources will be spent to develop and nurture this field, and policies and regulations will need to be put in place for the field to grow,” he said.