What did Toto Wolff, HPE, Oracle, and Sam Altman teach these old bones about AI?

I managed to schlep this old, non-AI-enabled body across a few states over the past week to attend a pair of industry events, one hosted by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) tied to the recent Formula 1 United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, the other being Oracle’s AI World event in Las Vegas.

While only one of those events thrust AI into the forefront, that topic provided the basis for some interesting commentary from smarter people than myself.

Let’s start with the one that was AI subtle.

HPE’s main angle with its F1-related event was to show its work with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team, work that extends from its prominent branding on the flanks of the car and lapels of team members/drivers and into providing technical and networking support for the team.

That work was highlighted during a press event that included self-professed car racing enthusiast and full-time HPE CEO Antonio Neri, and Mercedes-AMG Team Principal and Netflix “Drive to Survive” star Toto Wolff. While much of that event centered on the F1 team’s on-track performance, its use of AI was also discussed.

Wolff and team CIO Michael Taylor both expressed interest and support for the use of AI to help drive data processing efficiencies, especially as each of the team’s two race cars sports approximately 1,000 sensors across both vehicles.

However, Wolff did add that when it comes to using AI to help produce faster race cars, “there’s just one complication, and that complication sits between the steering wheel and the engine. It’s unreliable,” singling out the literal human-in-the-loop.

“The driver would say the car understeers. The data says oversteers. So who do you trust?” Wolff said. “My default kind of strategy is I trust the most expensive sensor, and that’s definitely the one that’s in the car.”

Neri did later explain that the use of AI in this racing environment is regulated so it might not be the perfect example of an AI use case, an astute point that makes any sort of broader AI-focused analysis difficult to ascertain.

But, that use case’s focus on squeezing every last byte of performance from petabytes of data could correlate to the financial market or cybersecurity teams, thus the human-linked decision making did add to the ongoing battle between man and machine.

I know this is a discussion that has defenders on both sides, but could the answer really be that it depends on the use case?

Sam Altman is human

As for the Oracle AI World event, what I found most interesting was a quick keynote conversation between Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The conversation itself was tied to Oracle driving OpenAI models deeper into its enterprise offerings, including a new Oracle-managed AI Security Mesh platform that uses OpenAI cybersecurity models to help customers find and fix vulnerabilities in their applications and infrastructure across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), other clouds, and on-premises environments.

While that work kicked off the conversation, Altman then went on to tout the ability for AI platform to help increase his productivity, a monologue that led one the world’s most AI-linked executive showing a bit of self-awareness by stating the need to more urgently connect the use of AI to mitigate those cybersecurity concerns.

“If I could recommend only one thing to a company right now to do with AI in the very short term, even more than become super-productive with Codex, it would be to really understand the security threat landscape from AI and mitigate against that,” Altman said. “And I realize that this is probably somewhat annoying for me to say, and it’s kind of like me, like ‘well, you’re creating the problem now. You’re telling us we have to spend or work on the situation.’”

Magouyrk did at this point throw Altman – and more specifically the entire AI-focused tech industry – a perspective-tinted lifeline by stating: “AI is not creating the problem. AI is not creating these bugs. AI is helping us discover all of the security issues that we have developed over the past 50 years. I’m glad that we’re able to now discover them with AI rather than waiting for some unknown hacker to let us know about them.”

Altman “super strongly” agreed with that point, before pointing to “the Herculean effort that it’s going to take to get ahead of this,” an effort that will lean heavily on AI’s strength.

I know Altman has received some shade as of late, but this brief on-stage interaction helped balance some of the deep skepticism I took from comments by from OpenAI Product Security Lead Drew Hintz during this year’s Cisco Live event that seemed to nonchalantly warn of “disaster scenarios” should AI adoption wane in even the slightest.

Sure, these OpenAI executives were engaged in different scenarios and different discussions, but to at least hear that firm’s top executive provide a glimpse of the real-world was refreshing.

And that’s really the main takeaway I had from both events. Sure, I probably remain a bit more skeptical than most when it comes to how the technology industry is barreling headfirst toward an AI-fueled future but there remains recognition that it will need to take the real world into account. I still remain skeptical, but perhaps these old bones can learn new tricks.