Utah AI industry voice agrees 'slowdown' would be beneficial

SALT LAKE CITY — Over the past week, some researchers have warned that artificial intelligence could pose an "existential" threat to the human race, frontier CEOs have spoken about the need for a "slowdown" and Utah's own governor has called for guardrails.

On Tuesday, an informed voice in Utah's growing AI industry agreed a slowdown is probably warranted as the technology continues to develop at a rapid pace.

"This does not need to run out of control as long as there are stable hands at the helm," said Kevin Williams, founder and CEO of Ascend AI, which consults other businesses as they integrate AI strategies and technologies. "We're talking about slowing down so maybe it's a linear pace of growth as opposed to an exponential pace of growth, and that could be a real benefit."

Williams told KSL the capabilities of the technology have gone "through the roof" over the past 6 months, and he has noticed concerning developments himself as he has experimented with consumer-level AI models.

"It will do things I didn't instruct it to," Williams explained during an interview Tuesday afternoon. "It would run off and try to log into various platforms. It would scan my email trying to figure out how to login."

Williams said presumably AI models still being tested in the lab are far more advanced.

"I think we're going to look back at this period as a bit of a 'Wild West' and really a challenging period," Williams said.

The tech entrepreneur didn't see a doomsday or "Terminator" scenario as the most likely, but he was concerned about bad actors using AI technology to commit crimes.

"It's likely going to be more financial crime than let's-wipe-out-humanity, but that's not so great for us, either," Williams said.

Williams said he does like the potential future benefits of AI for scientific fields like medicine, but he also expressed worries about the potential for AI monopolies in the years to come.

"I'm a little concerned about it turning into a monopoly, where those stable hands have these insane commercial interests involved," Williams said. "I'm a little concerned from a policy perspective that nationally we haven't really figured this out and what we're going to do about it, as the technology outpaces the ability of the government's ability to understand it."

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