Season 6, Post 21: Coffee with the CTO, 2024 edition
There are few things your author looks forward to more than sitting down for his annual chinwag with Heptagon’s Chief Technology Officer (previous editions can be found here and here). Over cups of Americano and salmon-avocado rolls in the beautiful London spring sunshine, we discussed all things from AI to cyber. If there was one key take-away, then it would be that “without security, we are nothing.”
Readers should not be surprised by this comment. The annual cost of cybercrime hit $8.5tr last year and is forecast to rise by at least $5tr over the next five years (per Statista). The “foundation” for all businesses should “start with security.” Any organisation, of course, is “only as strong as its weakest link” and so “creating a culture of paranoia” and “hesitancy among users” matters. Ongoing training, particularly in respect of spotting phishing emails is, therefore, integral.
Could AI help? Sure, technological advances have made cyber criminals more sophisticated in their approaches but so too have the defences of businesses become more robust. “We’re fighting AI with AI.” Artificial intelligence can “help learn how we work” and one of its key benefits for those seeking to secure systems is its strength in pattern recognition and spotting potentially abnormal behaviours. It is also important not to lose sight of the fact that over time AI will only become “more refined.”
As powerful as AI may be, we were also reminded that “everyone [has] jumped on the hype.” The technology may be getting better with each iteration but it “cannot augment and lift everything.” There remains the danger that outputs are potentially “robotic” as well as models still being susceptible to hallucinations. If deployed incorrectly, then AI could end up being “detrimental” to any organisation.
The good news is that in the future AI will be “doing things we haven’t even thought about.” The experience of mobile telephony may be instructive. Conceive of how the then-sophisticated Nokia handsets of the 1990s evolved to the almost ubiquitous iPhone, with facial recognition and more that is used today. The latest version of OpenAI’s popular large language model (Chat GPT-4 Omni) “could be a game-changer.” Project further ahead and the AI “killer app” might be some form of personal assistant able to pre-empt our every need. Maybe next year’s coffee with the CTO will be conducted between two avatars transcribing and summarising the conversation in real-time. But then again, the smell of fresh coffee is very enticing.
The Future Trends Blog will not be publishing next week since both your author and Heptagon’s CTO will be away at the firm’s annual offsite in Greece. The Blog will return in mid-June.
29 May 2024
The above does not constitute investment advice and is the sole opinion of the author at the time of publication. Past performance is no guide to future performance and the value of investments and income from them can fall as well as rise.
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Alex Gunz, Fund Manager
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