UN's Gill calls AI 'idiot savant,' warns of job losses
UN Under-Secretary-General Amandeep Singh Gill called AI an "idiot savant" at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, warning it could replace human experts and widen the gap between tech giants and everyone else.
His take: AI is both impressively smart and surprisingly clueless.
Gill explains why AI is an idiot savant
Gill broke it down—AI can be brilliant at specific tasks (like ChatGPT solving problems or managing projects), but it's also prone to silly mistakes, like confusing blurry backgrounds for animals if its training data isn't perfect.
AI's rapid growth and unequal access
AI is advancing fast—its independent runtime jumped from minutes to hours in just a year.
But access isn't equal: last year, Africa had under 1,000 GPUs for AI work while Meta had 600,000.
Gill compared this leap to "a general-purpose technology like steam or electricity, 'but on steroids.'"
Addressing AI's risks and UN's proposal for global fund
Gill worries about job loss, biased data, mental laziness, and mysterious super-intelligent AIs.
He pointed to a proposal by the UN Secretary-General for a $3 billion global AI fund to support 80-90 under-resourced countries, covering computing, data, talent and policy.