MODERNA'S CEO SAYS STAFF SHOULD CONSULT CHATGPT 20 TIMES A DAY

OpenAI is seemingly everywhere now--its ChatGPT system is in the vanguard of bringing AI to the masses. It's also laced through the workings of pharma giant Moderna, thanks to a deal weaving OpenAI tech deeply into the fabric of the company. So much so that Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel says his staff should be making the most of the investment in AI and using it a lot. More than "a lot." Bancel's suggestion: More than 20 times a day. Assuming a typical eight-hour workday, that means Bancel expects his staff to ask OpenAI's chatbots questions at least two, maybe three times every hour--an AI interaction rate that could easily, with some back-of-the-napkin estimates, eat up 10 to 15 minutes of work time each work hour. Maybe more. So what will all that employee-AI interaction do for Moderna? The Wall Street Journal quotes Bancel saying AI is going to be used to "reinvent all of Moderna's business processes, in science, in legal, in manufacturing--everywhere." So far, Moderna's staff have built many different custom GPTs using OpenAI's tech, the WSJ says. These are specially trained versions of the chatbot that are separate from the main ask-it-anything open-access ChatGPT system that most people have tinkered with online. Of the 750 or so custom Moderna GPTs, some are being used to help decide drug doses for clinical trials, and have presumably been trained on proprietary data from previous Moderna trials, while others have more business-specific uses, like helping Moderna deal with government regulators. An official statement from Moderna underlines Bancel's enthusiasm for the technology. He explained that AI is as impactful as the "introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s" which "changed the way we work and live." The goal for such widespread company adoption of AI tech is to support Moderna's "ambitious plan to launch multiple products over the next few years." This gives us a deeper clue as to what Bancel thinks AI can offer for his company: as a multiplier, enhancing the productivity and efficiency of his staff, in any division of the company. The company statement also quotes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: Moderna's simply "leading the way by empowering all of its employees to use AI to tackle complex problems," he said. The WSJ says Altman also explained that right now, ChatGPT may not be used to advance Moderna's scientific progress too much, though it will be able to tackle "more and more" scientific tasks "eventually." Right now, the best way for Moderna to advance its scientific objectives is "to enhance the productivity of people and accelerate what they can do," Altman said. What can your company do with this AI-embracing approach? Until now, it's been easy to see that content generated by AIs can boost simple business processes like building presentations or preparing marketing material, but Moderna's example shows that by embracing new technologies like custom-trained GPTs, AI could actually be used in almost every part of your business. It's just a question of working out where. If you're hesitant to embrace AI, or your staff themselves are stressed out by the tech's implications or are worried about simply using it, then maybe it's time to take some AI training for you, your management team, and your frontline staff.

3 KEY BUSINESS AREAS CYBERSECURITY FALLS SHORT

Putting your finger on exactly what drives business success is impossible because success is driven by a combination of factors. However, there is one thing that can compromise business resilience and your trajectory--cyber risk. Here are three key areas that drive business success and are at risk without an approach to network security that is designed for modern networks and operating models. 1. Innovation According to the most recent numbers available from the National Science Board, on a global basis, the U.S. leads in research and development with U.S. businesses spending over $608 billion on innovation in 2021--a 12 percent increase from the prior year. And these investments pay off. The top 50 companies in BCG's 2023 Most Innovative Companies report outperform on shareholder return by 3.3 percent per year. However, these days work environments are so diverse and dispersed that R&D teams are working on different clouds or even on-premises. Collaborating via any configuration in the modern network makes it particularly challenging to ensure only the people who are supposed to be working on an R&D project are in fact on the R&D project. This lack of visibility can put your intellectual property and trade secrets at risk. 2. Third-party ecosystem The average organization does business with 11 third parties and each of those third parties has a pathway into your organization--whether through technology integrations or supply chain processes or access into your environment as part of a service they deliver to the business. To mitigate exposure to risk from your third-party ecosystem, verifying that your suppliers have achieved SOC 2 compliance and have implemented a supply chain integrity process and a notification process if their supply chains are compromised are great places to start. Even still, 98 percent of companies do business with at least one third-party partner who has been breached. From a compliance, security, legal, and procurement perspective there are many reasons for concern. 3. Customer relationships The movement to meet customers where they are emerged nearly 15 years ago and now, depending on your industry, customers may expect to connect with you online, virtually, and through social media channels, in addition to in-person, phone, and email. Digital strategies are mostly cloud-based which means you are working with your cloud service providers and technology vendors to enable these services. Still, you are responsibile for protecting the data that flows through these channels and wherever it is stored, which can be overwhelming, particularly in today's multi-cloud environments. Think about cybersecurity differently The traditional approach to network security has been to focus on securing the network as well as possible and then detecting particular, known attacks. But there should never be a quantifiable threat coming from any of these vectors. It's how we collaborate in R&D or interoperate with partners and customers that can create opportunities for compromise. Beyond the known threats to every network, some activities should never occur and the ability to detect the behaviors that are known to be operationally out of bounds is incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, most organizations cannot detect that activity. When users, applications, data, and devices are spread across your multi-cloud and on-premises environment, how do you know what you've got, what it's doing, and what's happening to it? You need comprehensive visibility of all the participants across your environment and the ability to apply policies to enforce behavior that is normal or expected and alert you to activity that is not compliant. For example, when it comes to innovation, there's always the risk of IP being stolen and exfiltrated. R&D teams need to be segmented off from the rest of the organization using zero trust best practices of both identity-based access control and network segmentation to keep unauthorized users from accessing what's being worked on. These same best practices are also essential to have in place to mitigate risk from your third-party ecosystem or your customer-facing touchpoints. And since cloud misconfiguration issues are a major cause of data security breaches, it's also important to validate that your cloud infrastructure is configured and running properly. Rethinking network security to focus on comprehensive real-time observability of the activities of the users, applications, data, and devices across the entire multi-cloud and hybrid environment lets us see when things go awry. We can detect signs of abuse, misuse, or compromise to build resilience and continue on a trajectory to business success. EXPERT OPINION BY MARTIN ROESCH, CEO, NETOGRAPHY @MROESCH

WHY SAM ALTMAN IS BETTING ON SOLAR TO HELP POWER AI

AI needs more energy and Sam Altman is investing. The OpenAI CEO joined big name VC firms Andreessen Horowitz and Atomic in a $20 million seed round of funding for solar energy company Exowatt. The Miami-based startup is developing a modular energy platform to power data centers at a time when AI is expected to substantially drive up the power needs of global data centers. AI advocates are on the hunt for cheap and rapidly scalable energy systems as the energy needs of the technology explode. Exowatt's technology is a three-in-one, modular energy system roughly the size of a 40-foot shipping container. It uses what Exowatt CEO and co-founder Hannan Parvizian calls "a specially developed lens" to collect solar energy in the form of heat and store it in a heat battery. The stored heat is then run through an engine to convert it to electricity. Exowatt anticipates its solution could cut the cost of electricity down to $0.01 per kilowatt-hour once it hits scale. "What I think is unique about Exowatt is that we can provide a power solution that's dispatchable--that means you can have access to it throughout the day without any intermittencies--it's modular, you can scale it from small projects to large, it's built in the U.S. of course, and, most importantly, it's available today," Parvizian says. The amount of electricity that data centers around the world need could jump 50 percent by 2027 as a result of AI, according to one estimate from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's School of Business and Economics. Big tech companies and investors have begun eyeing nuclear power to meet the need. Altman, for example, is also invested in two nuclear power companies called Helion and Oklo, according to the Wall Street Journal. Exowatt offers another solution. "I do think we will have nuclear and other forms of energy on the grid that will also help support data centers, but if you think about it in practical terms, none of those technologies will be able to be deployed in the next year or even the next five years," Parvizian says. "I think Exowatt has a unique advantage here in being able to offer solution that can be deployed immediately." Parvizian says support from big name investors including Altman will position the company to serve "big tech customers building data centers or hyperscalers. Atomic CEO and founder Jack Abraham is also a co-founder of Exowatt.

"THE WORD PEOPLE" WILL BE HARDER TO REPLACE IN THE FUTURE, WHY?

As coverage of the AI tech tsunami and its potential impact on the world proliferates, it's now become a "Will they-or-won't they?" Bachelorette-style question of whether or not AI will steal people's jobs. So many different people have such differing opinions, from the catastrophically doomy to the more upbeat. The whole debate got another spin yesterday when billionaire, PayPal cofounder and tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel spoke up on a popular podcast. AI, Thiel believes, will prove to be really bad for all the "math people" in businesses the world over. Thiel spoke on the popular education chat podcast Conversations with Tyler, which attracts diverse A-list guests like, writer Neal Stephenson, and NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The conversation with Thiel ranged from topics like Roman Catholicism to the philosophy of politics, but when asked about the impact of AI on creative jobs like writers, Thiel took a somewhat surprising position. Typically, AI critics worry that the popular text-based chatbots everyone seems to be experimenting with right now are squarely aimed at replacing people in wordy, creative professions. "My intuition would be it's going to be quite the opposite, where it seems much worse for the math people than the word people," Thiel explained. People have told him that "they think within three to five years, the AI models will be able to solve all the US Math Olympiad problems," which will really "shift things quite a bit." He then dug into the history of math study and usefulness to the world, noting "if we prioritized math ability, it had this meritocratic but also egalitarian effect on society." But fast-forward to the 21st century, and narrow your focus in on Silicon Valley, then it's become "way too biased toward the math people," according to Thiel. And Thiel thinks math is doomed: "Why even do math? Why not just chess? That got undermined by the computers in 1997," he argued, before concluding "Isn't that what's going to happen to math? And isn't that a long overdue rebalancing of our society?" Arguably Thiel's assertion on Silicon Valley and math is true, though somewhat simplified: a lot of the technology innovations coming out of Silicon Valley are driven by science, which relies on math at its core. One very math-centric profession is now undergoing an AI-driven revolution. When touting the advances in his next-generation Grok AI system recently, Elon Musk made an effort to point out how much better it was at writing code, and calculating math, than the earlier version. Last month CEO of leading AI chip-making company Nvidia Jensen Huang predicted the "death of coding," with AI so capable of developing code that kids shouldn't learn how to code in school. With innovations like Microsoft's integration of its Copilot AI deeply into the coding social network Github, where AI is already helping coders craft code, it's easy to see Huang's point. Conversely, as any small business startup owner knows, innovation--even in a tech company--often requires a very non-mathematical, flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants human touch. Boiling all of Thiel's words down to a summary, we get this: AI is very capable of replacing some highly logical, mathematical jobs--like some of the coding, or basic analysis and simulation tools that help technology companies achieve breakthroughs. If AI really is coming for math nerds, as Thiel asserts, then maybe accountants, business analysts and other professions may also be under threat. But he thinks that for really creative roles, including word-centric creative professions, and, arguably, inventing new ideas, human kind is probably safe for a while. Thiel dodged another question about AI's impact on more manual work by suggesting that a better way to worry about the impact of AI is to ask different questions about it--a trick that cofounder of Google's AI research division DeepMind Mustafa Suleyman also recently suggested. Questions like "how much will it increase GDP versus how much will it increase inequality?" Unsettlingly, Thiel added, "Probably it does some of both."