- Prakhar Mehrotra, Senior Vice President and Head of Global AI at PayPal, believes that humanity has left the Information Age to enter the “Intelligence Age,” where AI not only stores and retrieves data but also generates new data itself.
- In the Information Age, value came from data access; in the Intelligence Age, the focus is on generation, reasoning, and moving towards partial automation of work.
- Although businesses are racing to deploy AI to increase productivity, results remain limited: an August MIT study showed that 95% of AI initiatives in businesses have not yet created rapid revenue growth.
- Mehrotra emphasized that the “crawl, walk, run” roadmap is still valid: businesses must take step-by-step actions to exploit AI effectively.
- Marc Hamilton, Nvidia Vice President, suggests the future belongs to the “AI factory,” built on-premise or in the cloud, where data is no longer retrieved by humans but self-generated by AI.
- He cited an example: when asking AI to create PowerPoint slides or generate code, AI does not fetch data from a database but uses a model to create new content.
- According to Mehrotra, the new “atomic unit” that businesses must focus on is the token – the basic unit for AI to understand, process, and generate language.
- Tokens are both training inputs and generative outputs, becoming a metric of AI capability.
- In May, Nvidia reported that Microsoft generated over 100 trillion tokens in the first quarter, a fivefold increase compared to the same period last year.
- However, data also shows that the link between token count and actual profit is weaker than what AI firms advertise.
- Mehrotra suggests that every business needs to build its own “token muscle”: deciding which tokens to buy, which to self-generate, and for what purpose they are created.
📌 PayPal’s Global AI Head believes that humanity has left the Information Age to enter the “Intelligence Age,” where AI not only stores and retrieves data but also generates new data itself. In the Information Age, value came from data access; in the Intelligence Age, the focus is on generation, reasoning, and moving towards partial automation of work.
