Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and CEO of Salesforce India and former chairperson of State Bank of India, expects generative artificial intelligence to solve many real life problems even as there are many questions around it that need to be answered.

She was responding to a query at the Bengal Chamber leadership lecture series and BCC&I Sardar Jodh Singh Award for Igniting Minds on Friday evening, powered by Exide Industries and Tata Steel in association with The Telegraph.

Bhattacharya said the ability of generative AI to understand plain language such as English and offer results in the plain language has resulted in its exponential growth.

“The basic difference between generative AI and AI is that the former works on what is called a large language model. So it is not needed to know languages like Fortran or Cobol or C or Python.

“The query can be made in plain English language and the model is intelligent enough to read plain English…and gather all the data and give the answer. But it is not sure that the data that it is gathering is correct or not. It cannot make out the difference between truth and false,” she said.

She added that the large language model has democratised the entire area of AI.

But there are also areas of concern for adoption of generative AI. “As a result of exponential data it can take in and throw back, the amount of compute power it needs is enormous. At this point of time it is too soon to know whether we can even afford this or not. There are still a lot of questions and we have merely scratched the surface of this,” she said.

However, generative AI is unlikely to lead to job losses, with the nature of jobs evolving. “While there are a lot of uncertainties, many of them can be answered over,” she said.

Alapan Banyopadhyay, chief adviser to the Bengal CM, Subir Chakraborty, president BCC&I, and Dhruba Mukherjee, CEO of ABP Pvt Ltd, were present at the event.