The former engineer at Google DeepMind Technologies, Tiago Ramalho, said in an interview with Lusa that "in ten years' time" the world's population will no longer "imagine what life is like without artificial intelligence".

The CEO and co-founder of Recursive, a startup based in Japan, believes that because "the field is moving so fast", within five years artificial intelligence will be "included in most products and services".

Within a decade, artificial intelligence will become "a ubiquitous technology", said Ramalho, starting with natural language processing, including ChatGPT and other models capable of generating complex texts.

The Portuguese said that, in the last two years, technology has reached a point where "it actually works quite well" and evolution has become "an engineering problem".

In other words, Ramalho explained, the challenge will be how to increase the number and quality of databases, reduce the costs of obtaining a response and adapt the models "perhaps even for cell phones".

According to a study published in March by Microsoft researchers, the popularization of artificial intelligence will affect professions mainly in the areas of telemarketing, accounting, translation, teaching and programming.

"When there is a technological transition, there are always people who are going to suffer and others who are going to benefit," admitted Tiago Ramalho, who believes that "the end result always tends to be positive".

Some scientists believe that artificial intelligence with consciousness could be another danger. One of them, Google engineer Blake Lemoine, said in June 2022 that the tech giant's LaMDA language model was "alive".

Google has rejected Lemoine's allegations and Tiago Ramalho also believes that LaMDA is simply "responding by following the context it is receiving" and "doing a bit of role-playing".

"If we ask him 'are you suffering locked in this data frame', he'll answer like in an Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) story," said the Portuguese, referring to the science fiction writer.

"There's still a long way to go" before we create an artificial intelligence with "an internal dialog, with preferences and values that don't depend on interactions with human beings," Ramalho said.

The scientist believes that "the most realistic thing is for humans to co-evolve with technology", building a society with the benefits of "a symbiosis between intelligent silicon agents" and humans.

Ramalho gives as an example Google DeepMind's AlphaFold technology, which "allows us to understand the structure of a protein based on the genetic code". "That's a problem that a human simply can't solve," he stressed.

Recursive, which currently has around 40 employees, is also using artificial intelligence to help Japanese companies create sustainable business models, he explained.

The startup is, for example, optimizing a group's home deliveries and predicting the irrigation needs of commercial forests managed in Indonesia by the Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo.

"We always try to find that synergy between what's good for the environment and also good for the company, because sometimes it's hard to sell the idea of sustainability," Ramalho explained. (portocanal)