Infosys CEO and Managing Director Vishal Sikka has said that the company’s move to support OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research entity, is part of its endeavour to help it to automate the more mundane parts of its work.
“AI training and building and using AI systems, can help amplify our abilities, can free us to exercise more of our creativity, our humanity,” Sikka said in his blogpost.
Infosys along with Amazon Web Services, YC Research and a few others have committed to donate $1 billion to support OpenAI.
He pointed out that most of the work conducted by Infosys is in building and maintaining software systems, and “AI will increasingly shape the construction and evolution of intelligent software systems, in all kinds of domains and industries, from complex machinery to consumer behaviour, from medicine to energy.”
In addition, as a large services company, many parts of Infosys’ work can transform fundamentally with AI. In services such as infrastructure management, business process outsourcing, and verification and maintenance of existing software, the company can massively migrate mechanisable work to automation, and instead build intelligent software systems, that amplify us, our abilities, as well as those of our customers.
Therefore, Sikka explained that the great transformation that the company is undertaking is to embrace automation at a very large scale, so people can "do more with less for more” and at the same time, educate ourselves in new areas to help build intelligent systems, but also to increasingly transform ourselves towards being innovators.
He was hopeful that the OpenAI team will be able to carry out unfettered research in the most important, most relevant dimensions of AI, no matter how long it takes to get there, not limited to just identifying dancing cats in videos, but to creating ideas and inventions that amplify our humanity, that help us learn more, see/perceive and understand more, and be more.