- Sridhar Vembu doubts AI catastrophe warnings by Anthropics and OpenAI CEOs
- He suggests AI firms could slow development themselves if concerned
- Vembu criticizes firms launching new AI models after calling for slowdown
Zoho's Co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer Sridhar Vembu expressed skepticism regarding the veracity of Anthropic's CEO Darius Amodei's warnings of catastrophe if AI development is not slowed down and regulated, a claim that OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman echoed.
Speaking to NDTV on Wednesday, Vembu said that rather than calling for a slowdown from other AI firms, they could slow down themselves.
"Nobody is putting a gun to their head and saying, 'Innovate'." he stated.
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Vembu pointed towards the fact the firms had launched new AI models days after their calls for slowing the pace of AI development.
"I jokingly say, it's like very good students in the class, telling everyone else, 'You don't study for the exam,' while they are secretly studying for the exam. As they call everyone to slow down, next week they'll launch new models," Vembu stated.
He also noted that both the US and China had rejected these claims, calling for heavy investments in AI technology stressing the need to "master" it.
"We must invest in research and development (R&D) heavily in this, this is very critical technology, we must master it. We are doing it, both in Zoho, in academia, in India, the ecosystem is investing heavily," he said.
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Vembu also spoke about Zoho launching its ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software from the Kumbakonam rural centre in Tamil Nadu.
"ERP is a complicated software, that is why it is so globally lucrative because it has a lot of moving parts. And we finally cracked it, we have been working for at least about eight years on it. Finally we have the software, now it is getting customised, tailored for specific industries, that is why it took that long," he said.
"We are seeing very good traction now, not only in India but around the world, in fact, that is one of our very fast growing product categories right now," he added.
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