Norwegian wealth fund warns of AI risks while reeling in billions from the tech

To claim that Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund made a killing these past months could well be an underestimation. The field’s supreme investor within the inventory market earned 1,501 billion crowns (€131.1bn) within the most major half of of 2023, and tons more and lots of it as a result of recent increase in AI.
To a substantial extent, the earnings came from the fund’s shares in tech companies similar to Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Nvidia that everyone seen a surge from the new AI craze. Meanwhile, the fund is telling the very same companies to procure mad by the responsible deployment and risks of synthetic intelligence.
“As AI turns into ubiquitous throughout the economy, it is more likely to carry substantial opportunities, nonetheless furthermore severe and uncharted risks,” the €1.28 trillion fund said in a letter published this week.
It added that the abilities continues to construct at a tempo that makes it indispensable to predict and tackle risks within the obtain of regulatory and reputational possibility to companies, besides broader societal implications linked to, to illustrate, discrimination and disinformation.
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In declare to mitigate the threats posed by the abilities, the letter urged the fund’s 9,000+ portfolio companies construct their abilities on AI on the board.
Boards “fully now not on top” of AI, fund CEO says
In an interview with the Monetary Cases, the fund’s CEO, Nicolai Tangen, said that “Boards are fully now not on top of this.” He further added that the fund would vote against companies that failed to notify on AI abilities at directorial level.
The oil fund furthermore needs companies to reveal and imprint how they exercise AI, and the procedure methods are designed and educated, so-called transparency and explainability. Furthermore, it is seeking out sturdy possibility management beyond a venerable enterprise point of interest, adding human oversight and regulate to mitigate capacity threats to privateness and discrimination. It didn’t jog thus some distance as to claim the doom of humankind.
Meanwhile, Tangen is now not scared in pointing out that, “When you happen to don’t notify there are opportunities with AI, then in my thoughts you might per chance per chance well perhaps furthermore very smartly be a whole moron.”
Within the letter, the fund furthermore states that it helps the come of “a whole and cohesive regulatory framework for AI that facilitates safe innovation and mitigation of detrimental impacts.”
Yet, Tangen acknowledges that this would per chance well be “very laborious” to enact on a worldwide scale, as a result of abilities’s shut to ubiquitous application in every thing from training and armed forces to autos and finance.