AI and the media: Q&A with Arvind Iyer, Springer Nature, Portugal.

In preparation for an in-depth report on AI and the media, we spoke to several experts in the field via email. One such expert is Arvind Iyer, Director of Technology at Springer Nature. Here is the full Q&A with him.

What are your current most common use cases of AI?

Broadly speaking, the most common types of use-cases in 2022 where we used more cutting edge AI solutions were centered around forecasting, recommendations, and NLP/NLU/NLG work. 

How else will you use AI in the coming year?

I am personally very hopeful of developments involving LLMs, graph networks, and embeddings. Both in-house, and externally. Our primary focus, apart from technology itself, is around thoughtful AI governance and driving meaningful adoption across the enterprise. 

What excites you most about the longer-term future of AI, and why?

My current opinion on this is that AI will firmly embed itself into the future of work, and the future of society. I am particularly hopeful about how quickly it will get adopted, at all levels. The numbers for Chat GPT’s extraordinary adoption are a good indication I think.

I am also excited by the progress shown by large parts of the world to work with AI. While regulations and standards by Governments and Multilaterals are undeniably progressive steps in the right direction, what is also interesting is the impact of firms within the space. 

Leading players across sectors are heeding the concerns of various stakeholders and are taking steps towards ethical AI. And it shows. 

Take two good examples. Meta’s Galactica LLM was withdrawn in just about 3 days because its team paid close attention to concerns about bias. Google refused to let anyone use its freely available Colab notebooks to build Deepfakes. 

What concerns you most about the longer-term future of AI, and why?

I think my biggest concern is that the world will change before its people pivot. At a global scale, the level at which AI has been adopted is quite astonishing and I think it’s not yet fully apparent that many businesses comprehend how much AI affects and can affect their everyday life at this very moment in time. Situations like these are always opportunities for good things and bad things to happen, and it is the latter that remains a cause for concern. 

What are some of the best AI tools (already available for use) that you can recommend to media companies to investigate immediately?

At a broad level, I would urge every firm to investigate ChatGPT closely, and look into the potential for its usage at an individual use case level. It’s also a great place to understand the value and need for good prompt engineering. 

For specific firms, the technology choices are still org and use-case specific. There’s a lot of new and cost-effective solutions that are emerging from the perspective of components of an end to end AI/ML stack, and it is still absolutely critical that firms work with the right AI and Systems Architecture talent to identify these opportunities.