Believe it or not, we are probably living through one of the most significant technological revolutions in the history of humanity, yet many of us are not even really aware that it’s happening. The true power and potential of Artificial Intelligence is all at once spectacularly impressive and terrifyingly ominous, and the rapid pace of development renders any accurate predictions about the future almost impossible. But one thing is certain, things are changing fast; for better or for worse, only time will tell.
Already AI touches many aspects of our daily lives: online search engines, Siri, Alexa, social media, GPS navigation, facial recognition, gaming – it’s influences are everywhere. Perhaps one of the biggest breakthroughs that really brought AI to more popular attention was the release of ChatGPT 3.0 in November 2022 by San Francisco–based company OpenAI. In July this year the company released a new and improved version ChatGPT4o capable of generating all types of texts, creating business plans, and offering advice and insight into almost any topic you can think of.
AI is impacting the way we do business, educate our children, manage our finances, treat diseases, manufacture products, grow our food, enjoy our leisure time and communicate with each other. This is just the beginning and the future benefits seem immeasurable.
And yet there’s a possible downside too. There are a host of concerns in terms of ethics, intellectual property, fraud, deepfakes, security, algorithm bias and social manipulation, job losses and effective governance. Many predict that in just a few years, we will be dealing with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) – AI that is not simply directed a specific tasks – and its cognitive capabilities will surpass that of humans. What then? Who will really be in control? Will AI take over and replace us? Will it view us as inferior and useless and simply eliminate us?
CEO of OPEN AI Sam Altman once noted: “Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” Are the scary predictions of science fiction novels and movies about to become reality? Perhaps, but that’s certainly too deep a topic to cover in this article!
Instead, in these pages, we speak to a number of local businesses and entrepreneurs who are developing and embracing AI to improve their operations and transform the landscape of the local economy. All of them express great enthusiasm for AI and a belief that we really have no choice but to embrace it.
“AI is already a worldwide thing and it is changing the game,” says James Si Tou, founder of TOGATHER, a local online marketing and event company. “Everyone needs to learn how to use these tools to help them extract more value. If you don’t understand why you should use AI in your work, in your education, in everything, you will not catch the train, and it will just leave you behind.”
“I hope AI will encourage the next generation to be brave enough to create something that is owned by them. I think in five to ten years, there will definitely be many new types of jobs and ways to work. You will see so many diverse small companies like mine. I am a one-person company, a solo entrepreneur, and many people can do it alone with the help of AI,” James adds.
Rex Loi, founder of local AI development company Converto Digital agrees.
“I think one person businesses are going to be more possible in the future, because many of the jobs like social media management, branding, marketing and communications, and customer service can all be done by AI.”
“At a bare minimum, every single job will have some sort of automation tool for it,” comments Eric Fung, co-founder of Colega AI based in Silicon Valley. “Right now, it’s still very much individual and general use, but in the future every industry will have tools to help automate their jobs.”
Raised in the US, Eric’s family are from Hong Kong. In 2019 he partnered with Macau local Kaiden Sin to set up Colega AI, a tech company focused on developing AI to help small businesses manage their social media platforms and customer service.
“AI is moving so quickly,” says Kaiden. “We just need to keep learning about the latest AI tools and try to apply them to make our lives easier. There is a quote which says, “AI will not replace you, but it will replace people who don’t know how to use AI.” That’s why I’m constantly trying to learn new skills everyday.”
James Si Tou expresses a similar sentiment: “AI will not defeat humans, but the people who know how to use AI will defeat you.”
“New technologies can often seem complex, and it’s natural for humans to be a little fearful of change,” offers António Andrade, co-founder of New York based tech company Ground. “But if we look at history, all the moments of great paradigm shifts resulted in greatly increased productivity, which generated immense progress and prosperity.” Now based in the US, António was born in Macau and went to school here.
“AI is a new technology that can seem threatening, but I’m an optimist and I don’t think that as humanity we have anything to lose. On the contrary, we have a lot to gain. It’s just a question of adapting,” he says.
Despite their enthusiasm for the technology, most agree that there are some potential downsides and concerns.
“This technology is going to help smart and ambitious people, but many people will be left out. It could create a very unfair situation, but not because the technology itself is unfair,” says James Si Tou. “I highly encourage all the universities and colleges to teach students why AI is so important and to change their mindset.”
“I think security problems and scams are going to be a problem,” notes Rex Loi. “Right now scammers can use your voice and image to create a video to call your family and tell them anything, so it’s very dangerous.”
“A lot of social media platforms like YouTube or Instagram require you to label AI generated content,” Rex adds. “I think they are collecting a database to make sure social media platforms know which content is AI so they can start generating some block systems to make sure scams won’t happen. It’s already very hard to recognize if something is a fake.”
Eric Fung of Colega AI suggests that AI governance is going to be very important: “Governance that’s not biased in anyway or that might offend people or be harmful to people. Facebook is putting these new rules about actually identifying if an image is AI generated or not. At Colega we put something called stoppers into our AI so it can only discuss topics related to social media and can’t become a troll. But of course, AI is moving so quickly, there’s really no control over it.”
“As a software engineer I’m actually quite fearful of AI every day. It’s improving so rapidly so maybe one day it will replace what I’m doing,” adds Eric’s business partner Kaiden Sin. “I think AI will replace engineers more than creative people, because creativity cannot be so easily automated. But with engineering there’s just one way of doing it, so it’s kind of surprising, because AI engineers are working so hard to replace themselves.
“Most people in the industry think we are going to have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in like five or 10 years, and once we have AGI, who knows what’s going to happen,” Kaiden adds. “We might be creating something like Terminator’s Skynet or something that is super benevolent and helps lift everyone out of poverty and gives us free money. We might even be able to call it God.”
Research into AI and machine learning has actually been taking place since the 1950’s.
In 1961 the first industrial robot started working on
an assembly line at General Motors in New Jersey.
In 1966 the first“chatterbot”(chatbot) was created named ELIZA.
In 1986 the first driverless car was demonstrated in Munich.
In 1997 IBM invented Deep Blue which became the first program to win a game of chess against world chess champion Gary Kasparov.
In 2011 Apple released Siri, the first popular virtual assistant.
In 2021 OpenAI developed DALL-E, which can process and understand images.
Converto Digital
呂曉霖 Rex Loi
Togather
司徒子竣 James Sitou
School of the Nations Macau
Bianca Gran – Primary School Teacher
Colega AI
Colega AI is an AI marketing company based in Silicon Valley. One of its co-founders and CPO is Kaiden Sin, a Macau local and graduate in Computer Science from the University of Macau. CLOSER spoke with Kaiden and fellow co-founder and CEO Eric Fung.
Success from the Ground up
António Andrade is a promising young entrepreneur in the field of Artificial Intelligence technology and online sales. Together with partners Shahriar Kabir and Kat Garcia, he is the co-founder and CTO of Ground, one of the newest technology companies based in New York, with links to Silicon Valley. Since 2021, Ground has aimed to help e-commerce companies find consumers quickly and efficiently by using AI.
