Keep AI moving to reap rewards: HubSpot

US software player HubSpot wants curbs on AI but says a freeze on the technology is unrealistic.

Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and chief technology officer of tech platform company HubSpot, at the Inbound conference in Boston. Picture: Getty Images

Tech customer platform HubSpot has rejected a call from ­regulators to pause artificial intelligence applications, saying the value that society would gain from ­advancing the technology outweighed any emerging risks.

The US tech player, which is incorporating AI agents into its Breeze software offering for business, supports regulatory curbs but said pausing the fast-moving technology was unrealistic.

“Some regulation needs to exist,” HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah told The Australian.

“I think we need to understand that this is powerful technology and there need to be guard rails in terms of what it will and will not do and how far it will and will not go.

“The part I disagree with is the groups that are saying we need to slow this down, we need to control it or lock it down for a year. I don’t think that’s practical.
“The technology is moving too fast, it’s too valuable and it crosses governmental borders. So even if any individual country said we want to lock it down, that doesn’t really change the rate of progress everywhere else.”

The EU privacy watchdog in July called for big tech to voluntarily pause the training of its future AI models so it could better understand the potential pitfalls of the technology.

In Australia, Labor said earlier this year it would consider new “mandatory safeguards” for AI systems in high-risk areas, including a new dedicated legislative framework, as it moves to realise a $600bn-a-year boost to the national economy by building trust and confidence in the technology.

Mr Shah, who is HubSpot’s chief technology officer, backs open-source AI models, including Meta’s Llama product, as one positive way to offer more transparency for the technology.

“They’re now in line roughly with some of the commercial and closed models. And it gives us an option to say here is a model, we know exactly what the code is and we can use it for our purposes but it’s open and accessible and out there,” he said.

“The history of technology shows that when that happens, it raises the bar for the closed providers and keeps the honest people honest in a way. And it says to them we have to provide something that at least has the guard rails and some degree of transparency.

“So if a company is making a decision on the trustworthiness of a model … open source competition is a good thing in that regard.”

Australia’s Productivity Commission has previously encouraged governments not to design “unnecessary and confusing” new regulations to govern artificial intelligence applications, warning that “new technology does not necessarily imply the need for new rules”.

* The reporter travelled to HubSpot’s Inbound conference in Boston as a guest of the company

Originally published as Keep AI moving to reap rewards: HubSpot