Data and AI guru Richard Benjamins argues that intelligent regulation boosts innovative use of GenAI, and explains the pros and cons of three main approaches to leveraging the tech
Until March 2024, Richard Benjamins was Chief Responsible AI Officer at Telefonica and founder of its AI for Society and Environment initiative, where he played a pivotal role in shaping Telefónica’s approach to the ethical use of AI. He is co-founder and CEO of the Spanish observatory for ethical and social impacts of AI (OdiseIA), founder and Co-CEO of RAIght.ai, a responsible AI startup and chair of EIT Digital’s Supervisory Board.
Benjamins was in conversation with Mobile Europe‘s editor, Annie Turner, at our most recent virtual Telco to techco conference. This article only briefly highlights some of the topics we covered – watch the whole session on video now.
We started by discussing GenAI models. Benjamins said he doesn’t think there is much point in telcos creating their own large language models (LLMs) as there are a number of LLMs available around the world that “can be perfectly used by telecommunication operators and any business around the world”.
He thinks a good way to think about LLMs is that they are like the public cloud – “in that most of companies across the world will use those services on the cloud. That doesn’t mean that they can be profitable or or innovative, etc because they will run it on top of that.”
He warned, “It’s very hard for an individual organisation to keep the pace with those big companies that invest a huge amount of money in this technology. If a telco wants to…build such a model by themselves, they need to be aware that they need a huge amount of resources, a huge amount of skills to be better. Otherwise, you have your own language model, but it’s worse in all aspects, security, safeguarding costs, etc. compared to others.”
