(W.E. Talk) Fausto Giunchiglia: How to Embrace the Ongoing Development of AI?

By Guan Yilun from China News Service (CNS)

March 5, 2025

OpenAI announced last Thursday the release of a research preview of its latest GPT-4.5 model, saying it is the largest model for chat yet. Since the start of 2025, a number of tech companies, including the Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek, the French company Mistral AI, and xAI which is led by U.S. entrepreneur Elon Musk, have launched new AI models in succession, showing the ongoing growth in the AI sector.

What is the developing trend of AI? What is the ideal relationship between competition and cooperation in the AI sector? What other challenges will AI technologies face in the future? What attitude and actions should we take to embrace the ongoing development of AI? Fausto Giunchiglia, member of the Academia Europaea and the honoree of the 2024 Chinese Government Friendship Award, recently gave an exclusive interview to W. E. Talk at China News Service to offer his explanation of these issues. 

Here are excerpts of the interview:

CNS: What are the priorities in the development of the AI sector? To what extent does AI affect the development of human society? 

Fausto Giunchiglia: At the moment, with the very fast development of Generative AI (GenAI), the dominating trend, even if not the only one, is towards the generation of intelligent systems which support users in people-centered tasks, that is, tasks that people have to do as part of their everyday or working life. Examples of such tasks are writing letters and text in general, solving mathematical problems, writing (easy) software programs, providing answers to user questions, typically on topics which are outside the user expertise, and so on.

The current trend will likely have an impact on the very foundations of human society. This might happen very fast. It is immediate to see two of the main opportunities that GenAI offers. The first is that a lot of knowledge-intensive work will be automated. The second is that people will have access to online oracles which will provide answers to almost any question. It will be possible to ask questions in natural language and the answer will no longer be a link to a web page, as with Web search, but an answer generated by integrating the online content with the large amount of commonsense knowledge that GenAI systems possess.