There’s a lot of hyperbole around artificial intelligence these days. However, there are a lot of good intentions as well, and many are looking to build AI that doesn’t involve haves and have-nots.

Some believe that AI may be inevitable, but human agency is not. But that’s not in the sense of AI taking over, according to Jonathan Ross (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Groq Inc.

“I mean that in dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, people trying to influence,”  he added. “Our mission is to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s to make sure that everyone has access to AI and that we all can benefit from it … we continue to have human agency. And so we need to be essential to the infrastructure to help guide that.”

Ross spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Lisa Martin and Savannah Peterson at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how to ensure everyone has access to AI and the need to play offense.

Stopping the negatives

Those who spend a lot of time thinking and talking about technology tend to hear a lot of the positives about AI. But there is a lot of doomsday talk out there in the media right now.

“One of the biggest things is, we keep thinking of AI safety in a defensive way of, ‘We must stop the negatives,’” Ross said. “I was just chatting with an AI safety expert this morning, and as we were talking, we came to the mutual conclusion that we need to play offense.”

One should think about it in a certain way, according to Ross. Imagine a person types a query in, and it’s a query that goes to a negative place, and it guides you.

“It says, ‘Why don’t we think about this a little bit? There’s subtlety and nuance to your question. It’s not as simple as you think,’ because the solution to a lot of strife between people is that subtlety and nuance,” he said. “We’ve never had the ability. Just imagine, if today, you could have some of the smartest people in the room when people are trying to do bad things and just going, ‘No, no, no. Hold on a second. Let’s think about this.’”

When it comes to Groq, inference is one of the company’s main differentiators. When one trains a model is when it costs money, according to Ross.

“When you put it in production, you make money. Inference is when you make money. Training is when you spend money. So, inference is pretty important if you’re running a business,” he said. “The way to think about it is, when you were developing software, you would compile it. That’s training. When you deploy it in production, that’s inference. And so for machine learning, we finally have gotten to the point where we have models that are useful. Up until now, it was all about trying to get a model that worked.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE