CEO Edmund Jackson: AI currently produces intern level work, but it's rapidly developing

Generative artificial intelligence and large language models, as they stand now, produce outputs that are the equivalent to what an intern would produce. 

But in the next few years Edmund Jackson, CEO of UnityAI, said that same AI will reach PhD level outputs. 

“That starts to become really disruptive or useful or interesting in our business, way more than an intern is now,” Jackson said. “What I suggest … is if we can find ways now as business leaders to integrate AI into our companies, knowing that the output is just intern level output, we’ve laid the foundations that are necessary. As the Oracles and the Googles and OpenAIs improve their AIs, we’ll almost automatically be able to reap the benefits of that improved AI because the integration and the knowledge and the foundations are the same.”

Over the past four years or so, generative AI has drastically changed. Jackson, who was the keynote speaker at the Business Journal’s AI Summit Oct. 15, said the capabilities of AI models have gone from a kindergarten level to a college student. 

“That’s a rapid growth of capability in a short period of time,” Jackson said. “But to get value from an AI, we have to onboard it in the same way as we would onboard an intern or any other person.”

To Jackson, that means opening the books to AI, so to speak, and letting it have access to data. He likened the technology to a power tool that helps take some of the burdens of low-level work so businesses can instead put their focus on other parts of work. 

UnityAI, co-founded by three former HCA Healthcare (NYSE:HCA) employees, raised $4 million in capital earlier this year to get the company up and running. The AI company's mission is to transform how hospitals optimize patient flow by building software for clinicians and nurses using AI-incorporated technology. 

“It’s a transformation of ourselves in order to apply AI that’s necessary,” Jackson said. “It can help us with the scut work of summarization, of extracting data, all of those things that we have to do in our companies.”

While it seems scary to open one’s company to technology, Jackson said it isn’t as scary as it seems. 

“We have never dealt with something smarter than us,” Jackson said. “Before, we never dealt with something stronger or faster than us but our society adapted and learned how to integrate it into the old ways of working here in the same way we will with AIs.”

There are bad things that can be done with AI, but there’s also good coming out of the technology. 

“It’s a balance, and it comes down to how we as society choose to moderate our ethics and morality,” Jackson said.