• by Ray Schultz , July 24, 2023

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff believes that companies, governments and other stakeholders must work together to get their arms around AI. 

“Technologies are never good or bad, it’s what we do with them that matters,” Benioff says, according to AP. “Nobody wants a Hiroshima moment to understand how dangerous AI is. We want to be able to kind of get our heads around the tremendous consequences of the technology that we are working with.” 

He adds that this is going to require “a multi-stakeholder approach — companies, governments, non-governmental organizations and others to put together the guidelines for this technology.”

Benioff concedes: “None of us are really ready for this because none of us have had this experience before. We are on the threshold of a dramatic change in the way we work with computers. We are going to work side by side with them. And, in many cases, they are going to augment or extend what we have been doing. They are going to be taking actions without our knowledge.”

How advanced is ChatGPT? 

Benioff says: “We are moving from the generative ChatGPT phase, which is phase one, into a stage where we are about to see agents that are quite alive and aware and able to take these kinds of massive actions,” Benioff continues, according to AP. “These are called multimodal agents, that is they can move from text to speech to video. And then we are going to move into something that is maybe more multi-sensory, where these agents are going to be more aware of us and we are going to be more aware of them.”

The full interview can be found here.