The year 2020 saw a lot of new developments in the AI and data science field — from Neuralink to GPT-3, along with some significant announcements from events such as Nvidia GTC 2020 and RAISE 2020. These exciting developments were accompanied by quotes and remarks by tech leaders. As the year 2020 comes to an end, we round up a few of these quotes that defined the year 2020. 

Narendra Modi, PM, India, while speaking at RAISE 2020 said: 

“AI is a tribute to human intelligence power. At every step of history, India has led the world in knowledge and learning.”

He further stated, 

“It remains our collective responsibility to ensure trust in how AI is used. Algorithm transparency is key to establishing this trust. Equally important is accountability. We must protect the world against the weaponisation of AI by non-state actors.”

Echoing his thoughts on India leading the AI race, Dr Arvind Krishna, CEO, IBM at RAISE 2020 said: 

“I firmly believe that India can lead the AI technology revolution. India has the world’s largest community of developers, a large startup ecosystem, and a strong scientific and engineering culture.” 

Emphasising on the importance of data, Mukesh Ambani, from Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), at RAISE 2020 said:

“In the past, nations have competed on physical, financial, human and intellectual capital. But, in the coming decades, nations will increasingly compete with digital capital. India has a unique advantage to harness its enormous digital capital for AI-driven development, which is “bottom-up and inclusive.”

Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia during his keynote session at Nvidia GTC 2020 said: 

“This is an amazing time for the computer industry and the world, as the mobile cloud matures, the age of AI is beginning.” 

Talking about how the future will be autonomous, Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia during his keynote session at Nvidia GTC 2020 said: 

“Everything that moves will be autonomous someday, whether partially or fully. Breakthroughs in AI have made all kinds of robots possible, and we are working with companies around the world to build these amazing machines.”

Elon Musk at Neuralink 2020, one of the most hyped events of this year, said: 

“We can save and replay memories. The future is going to be weird. I mean this is obviously sounding increasingly like a black mirror episode but yeah essentially if you have a whole-brain interface everything that’s encoded in memory you could upload, you could basically store your memories as a backup and restore the memories, then ultimately you could potentially download them into a new body or into a robot body the future is going to be a weird one!” 

Sharing strong disagreement with the kind of AI that DeepMind is making, Elon Musk in an interview said: 

“Just the nature of the AI that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games. I mean, it’s basically the plotline in ‘War Games.” 

In another news, Yann LeCun, Professor at NYU and a Chief AI Scientist at Facebook strongly thrashed out GPT-3: 

“Some people have completely unrealistic expectations about what large scale language models such as GPT-3 can do…It’s entertaining and perhaps mildly useful as a creative help. But trying to build intelligent machines by scaling up language models is like building high-altitude airplanes to go to the moon.”

Andy Jassy, CEO at AWS while addressing the crowd on cloud adoption, during his keynote speech at AWS re:Invent said: 

“I think when you look back on the history of the cloud, it will turn out that the pandemic accelerated cloud adoption by several years.”

Dr Arvind Krishna, CEO, IBM during the IBM’s Think Digital Event said:

“History will look back on this as the moment when the digital transformation of business and society suddenly accelerated. This is an opportunity to develop new solutions, new ways of working and new partnerships that will benefit your company and your customers, not just today, but for years to come.”