During his keynote speech at SmartCon 2023, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov shared his vision for a Chainlink-powered verifiable web in the age of AI. He expanded on these ideas during a fireside chat with former Google CEO, Chairman at Steel Perlot, and strategic advisor to Chainlink Labs, Eric Schmidt, who offered his perspective on the critical role Chainlink plays at the intersection of blockchain and AI.
Google AI Lead Laurence Moroney was another important voice in the AI conversation at this year’s SmartCon. Building on his fireside chat with Chainlink Labs CPO Kemal El Moujahid about Why Web3 Makes Sense in the AI Era, Moroney sat down with Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino to discuss how scalable education and advocacy can help realize the opportunities AI and machine learning have to offer.
He described the evolution of AI technology in terms of the Gartner hype cycle, which begins with inflated expectations and misinformation.
“Inflated expectations really happen when people don’t understand how something works and they have all of these narratives and all of these stories,” he explained. “I think the more people building this stuff, the more people will understand this stuff, and then all of these anxieties and fears I hope will evaporate.”
Having witnessed the number of global AI developers grow from 100,000 to several million over the past decade, Moroney is hopeful reality will soon replace the mystique surrounding AI.
He believes a more realistic view begins with understanding AI as the simple concept of “having a computer react to data in the same way as a living being would.” This means, for example, teaching a computer to recognize a picture of a cat instead of a collection of pixels. Machine learning, therefore, is the technique used to build the concept of AI.
Moroney explained why popular consumer-facing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which have “made everything very, very exciting but also very, very confusing,” are part of the journey toward realizing how AI can be utilized to make the world a better place.
“From the hype cycle perspective, we’ve kind of dragged back a little bit, but that’s okay, because that means that the opportunity, once we go beyond that, will be even bigger,” he said.
The key, in Moroney’s view, is to train as many AI developers as possible. He imagined what the world could look like if today’s several million AI developers became several hundred million.
“All of the biggest companies in the world are really built off of the work of programmers and developers,” he said. “What if the existence of this technology, if it’s channeled properly, means that we can have 300 million or more developers? The opportunity there is stunning.”
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Laurence Moroney.