President Cyril Ramaphosa wants to get a better understanding of artificial intelligence, and he's planning a trip to Silicon Valley to do just that. Speaking at a Black Wednesday commemoration hosted by the ANC in Johannesburg on Monday, he said that after the 4 November local government elections he will lead a South African delegation to the American technology hub.
The group would include government officials, academics, business leaders, young South Africans and, as he put it, some of his comrades too. The aim, in his words, is "to go and meet those big moguls of artificial intelligence, to get to understand exactly how it functions and how we can utilise it to our own benefit". He called it a "study group", and said it might go on to China afterwards. He gave no date and named no companies, and when News24 asked whether BEE, Afrikaners and AI companies building data centres here were on the agenda, he said they would discuss "everything under the sun".
Translation is only the start
Ramaphosa pointed to translation as one opportunity, in a country with 12 official languages and, as he put it, this much "linguistic diversity". That barely scratches the surface of what the technology could offer government.
Businesses are already using AI to cut costs and streamline how they operate, and the state could do the same. Speeding up applications at Home Affairs, or connecting systems across departments, could change how public services are delivered to the people who rely on them.
The risk he has seen up close
The opportunities come with risks, and Ramaphosa used the same speech to warn about misinformation. "A statement that was never made can be attributed to a political leader," he said. "An event that never happened can be presented as fact." He has had it done to him, in a fake that put him in a hospital bed. "Many people believed it," he said.
It's a problem governments around the world are confronting as they start adopting the technology themselves, and South Africa is no exception. EWN reports that he also wants the trip to cover what AI means for journalism, and that he argued technology cannot replace the value of telling true stories.
So the study group has plenty to bring home. The real test is whether Ramaphosa comes back from Silicon Valley with more than a better understanding of ChatGPT.
