Victor Riparbelli attends G7 AI lunch in Évian

Today, Synthesia CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli joined other technology CEOs, G7 leaders, and their guests at a lunch during the G7 summit in Évian, France. 

The discussion focused on two themes: how AI adoption can drive economic growth while limiting risks and maintaining stability, and how businesses and civil society can work together to protect the future of our societies and the next generations of citizens.

Victor's thoughts are included below:

“Today, almost all the conversation about AI happens at the level of the models. Who has the biggest one, who trained it fastest, who spends the most on data centers. That conversation is important, but we should talk as much about the application layer, which is how most businesses and consumers will interface with AI.

“Most businesses don't buy models. They buy a product that solves a problem they actually have: training a workforce, answering a customer, hiring the right person, getting a product to market.

 “Most of the value of AI is created at the application layer, where it meets a real workflow. If our economies keep pouring almost all their attention and capital into the frontier, and downplay everything built on top of it, we will keep waiting for the adoption but it will never come. Or we will be disappointed when we don't see the returns that the headlines keep promising.

"At Synthesia, this is the gap we're trying to close. We use our own models and those of others to turn AI into video that companies rely on. 90% of the Fortune 100, 87.5% of CAC 40, 95% of the DAX 40, and 70% of the FTSE100 use our platform already to create and share AI video for employee training, customer support, recruitment, sales enablement and product marketing.

“And we've been doing it with the right guardrails. Back in 2017, we helped design the first rules for responsible AI video creation, alongside industry, governments and civil society, to prevent the spread of non-consensual deepfakes. Last week, we became the first European company tosign on to the EU Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, after working for months with the European AI Office to make the document workable. We also recently signed an MoU with the UK Government to accelerate the upskilling of 10 million UK workers in AI over the next four years.

“So here is our commitment. By 2030 we will put interactive AIvideo tools for upskilling and training into the hands of 75 million workers. That is the entire workforce of the world's 500 largest companies. Not only will this help with AI adoption, we believe it will also help grow media literacy through the use of good and responsible AI. The more people work with these tools out in the open, the better their instinct becomes for spotting the harmful uses too.

"You can make this far easier. Create the conditions forcompanies like ours to grow, and help the public feel better about thistechnology rather than dread it. We spend too much energy thinking about theworst case or fearing the unknown. 

“Throughout the history of technology we see the same repeating patterns – no one can predict what will actually happen in the future, it’s much easier to imagine the jobs lost than the jobs created and the economies that embrace technological shifts, rather than fight them, are the ones that ultimately end up thriving on the world stage. Let’s embrace the unknown and spend more time figuring out what happens if it all goes well, and how we make it happen.”

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