ECB launch Infinity Team and Softbank bets on Generative AI

An European Central Bank unit called the “infinity team” has launched nine trials of generative AI — adapting off-the-shelf systems that can create sophisticated text, images and computer code — after canvassing staff for ideas of where it could be most effective.

Softbank bets on Generative AI

The ECB is reported to be experimenting with generative artificial intelligence across its operations to speed up basic activities, from drafting briefings and summarising banking data, writing software code and translating documents.

The move comes as central banks cautiously explore how to harness the latest advances in AI, including large-language models such as ChatGPT, though they stress it is a long way before it could be trusted to help set interest rates and other monetary policies.

Trained on large data sets of unlabelled text, generative AI is capable of having a humanlike conversation and producing unique content.

While many private sector companies have already seized on the new technology to gain a competitive edge since its emergence last year, central banks have been more cautious due to concerns about reliability, legal risks and transparency.

The areas chosen by the ECB to test generative AI include producing first drafts of briefings, summarising meetings, drafting code for software, improving the language of official communications, translating documents and producing newsletters.

ECB officials say they are working closely with other major central banks to explore AI, including the US Federal Reserve, Bank of England and Monetary Authority of Singapore.

One concern for central bank officials and banking supervisors is if AI is seen as a “black box” that is not transparent on how it produces its conclusions, which would make decisions based on its research hard to defend if they were later subject to a legal challenge.

“An AI black box with no insight into the decision-making process is of limited value,” Lisa Cook, a member of the Fed’s board of governors, said in a speech last week.

“As a policymaker, I look upon model-generated forecasts with a sceptical eye, if they are not coupled with a plausible explanation for the driving factors behind them.”

The ECB is already using AI in several areas, including structuring the real-time pricing information it tracks on thousands of products and classifying the data it collects from millions of sources.

These are time-consuming and relatively mundane tasks that can be done faster and more efficiently by a computer.

Softbank Billion Dollar Bet

In similar news, OpenAI is in advanced talks with former Apple designer Sir Jony Ive and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son to launch a venture to build the “iPhone of artificial intelligence”, fuelled by more than $1 billion in funding from the Japanese conglomerate.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief, has tapped Ive’s company LoveFrom, which the designer founded when he left Apple in 2019, to develop the ChatGPT creator’s first consumer device.

Altman and Ive have held brainstorming sessions about what a new consumer product centred on OpenAI’s technology would look like.

They hope to create a more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with AI, in the way that the iPhone’s innovations in touchscreen computing unleashed the mass-market potential of the mobile internet.

The process of identifying a design or device remains at an early stage with many different ideas on the table.

Son, SoftBank’s founder and chief executive, has also been involved in some of the discussions, pitching a central role for Arm — the chip designer in which the Japanese conglomerate holds a 90% stake — as well as offering financial backing.

Son, Altman and Ive have discussed creating a company that would draw on talent and technology from their three groups, the people said, with SoftBank investing more than $1 billion in the venture.

Discussions are said to be “serious”, but no deal has been agreed, they cautioned, and it could be several months before a venture is formally announced.

Any resulting hardware product is likely to take years to bring to market.