“They don’t have emotions. All they do is solve really, really complicated math problems,” according to David Adkins, senior engineering manager for generative AI at Meta AI.
That was the message at The Columbian’s annual Economic Forecast Breakfast Tuesday morning as an expert in artificial intelligence gave Clark County business people a look at AI and its impacts on business in Clark County.
Around 300 community members attended The Columbian-sponsored event at the Hilton Vancouver Washington on Tuesday morning.
Adkins was among the three speakers that joined Columbian Associate Editor Will Campbell in the discussion.
Adkins talked about the benefits and pitfalls of the technology. (Meta is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.)
Adkins addressed fears of sentient artificial intelligence, calling the technology simply math.
A common question he hears is whether or not artificial intelligence software on cellphones is listening to conversations to customize ads.
“The answer is no,” Adkins said. “People are just really predictable. And that’s why AI works.”
He discussed how software such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT can make work more efficient, helping to summarize multipage documents or convey information in a wacky but consumable way — such as explaining physics as a surf bro.
“This is something that shows the power of what these systems can do,” Adkins said. “But more importantly, what you need to realize is that people don’t even know what all the capabilities are today.”
Adkins said the technology has limitations, such as AI hallucination — a glitch where the software predicts what users want to hear, rather than giving factual information.
Krystal Daibes Higgins, vice president of equity research at Ferguson Wellman, and Dave Barcos, director of business development at Vancouver software company Formos and founder of North Bank Innovations, discussed how their businesses have implemented artificial intelligence.
Higgins’ company created an AI committee to explore how artificial intelligence could be used.
“We’re trying to make ourselves more efficient, more productive and then grow our business,” she said.
Barcos said there’s “incredible innovation” in artificial intelligence but it’s happening at a grassroots level.
“There’s not consultancies that are popping up trying to teach people how to do this,” he said. “The technical community inside these companies are leaning in and really trying to make things so.”
2024 and beyond
Scott Bailey, consulting economist and former regional economist at the Washington Employment Security Department, presented his annual economic forecast at the end of the event.
Referring to his alternate persona “Dr. Doom,” Bailey pointed to the region’s average household income growing most among the top 5 percent. Housing permits are down for both single family and multifamily buildings.
Bailey said data shows there’s been a roughly 10 percent shift to work-from-home, evenly split between workers who once worked out of state and those working at a Clark County site.
He talked about the rise in employment in Clark County — which has surpassed pandemic job recovery rates for Oregon, Washington, the nation, Portland, Seattle and every other market in the state.
Construction, professional services and health care are driving job growth in Clark County, Bailey said.
The longtime economist also said hourly wages have increased in the past few years, especially for those in the county’s highest paid jobs.
Touching on drivers of inflation, Bailey showed a graph displaying corporate profits, which skyrocketed coming out of the pandemic. He also pointed to supply chain problems and stimulus funds, though said neither had as big of an impact on inflation as corporate profits.
Bailey said there isn’t a consensus among the Federal Reserve Board governors about when interest rates will be cut but an economist he follows, Claudia Sahm of the Jain Family Institute, anticipates movement in July.
