IBM Director General of Arvind Krishna says, despite the Trump administration attacks on globalization, global trade has not died. In fact, he thinks the US key to growing will embrace an international exchange of goods.
“So, I am really a strong believer-I think goes back to economists who studied global trade in the 1800s and I think their perspective was, every 10% increase in global trade leads to a 1% increase in local GDP,” Krishna said during a stage interview at SXSW on Tuesday. “So if we want to really optimize for local (growth), you must have global trade.”
Global trade goes in parallel with allowing talent abroad to flow to the US, Krishna said. The administration and its allies have called for increased restrictions on the students’ work visas and H-1B, which they claim to put American citizens at disadvantage.
“We want people to come here and bring their talent with them and apply that talent,” Krishna said. “And we want to develop our talent as well, but you can’t also develop it if you are not bringing the best people from all over the world for our people to learn.
During the extensive interview, Krishna touched not only geopolitics, but also the one he thinks is a valuable technology-but not Panacea. He disagreed with a recent forecast from Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, that 90% of the code will be written by him in the next three to six months.
“I think the number will be more like 20-30% of the code can be written by it-not 90%,” Krishna said. “Are there some cases of really simple use? Yes, but there is an equally complicated number of those where it will be zero. “
Krishna said he thinks he would ultimately make programmers more productive, increasing their results and their employers rather than eliminating programming work, as some critics have predicted.
“If you can make 30% more code with the same number of people, would you get more written code or less?” He said. “Because history has shown that the most productive enterprise gains market share, and then you can produce more products, which allows you to get more market share.”
Annated known, IBM has a given interest in presenting it as non -threatening. The company sells a range of energy products and services from it, including auxiliary coding tools.
The statements are also a bit of an overthrow for Krishna, who said in 2023 that IBM planned to stop employment in the backlog offices that the company predicted could replace with Tech.
Krishna compared debates over him replacing workers with early debates on calculators and photoshop replacing mathematicians and artists. He admitted that there are “unsolved” challenges about intellectual property, where it is about training and results, but after all, technology is a positive force – and Shtime.
“It’s a tool,” Krishna told him. “If the quality everyone produces becomes better using these tools, then for the consumer, you are now consuming better quality (products).”
This tool will get cheaper, Krishna predicted. While he noted that the so -called reasoning models like O1 and Openai require a lot of computing and thus are intense with energy, he thinks he will use “less than 1%” of the energy he is using today thanks to developing techniques such as the Chinese beginning of AI Deepseek.
“I think Deepseek gave us an observation that you can live with a much smaller model,” Krishna said. “Now the question arises. Do you need some really big models to start? And I think that’s what (Deepseek) didn’t speak.”
But while he will convenience, Krishna is not convinced that he will help mankind to achieve new knowledge, echoing a last essay by embracing the co -founder of Thomas Wolf. On the contrary, Krishna thinks that quantum calculation – an IBM technology has been invested too much, not for nothing – it will be the key to accelerating scientific discovery.
“He is learning from the knowledge already produced, literature, graphics, etc.,” Krishna said. “He is not trying to understand what will come (…) I am the one who does not believe that the present generation and he will take us towards what is called general artificial intelligence, (…) when he may have all the knowledge to be fully reliable and answer questions beyond those who were answered by Einstein or Oppenheimer or all the Laureates of Nobel Price.”
Krishna’s allegations are in contrast to those from Openai Director General Sam Altman, who said in an essay earlier this year that he “superintelligent” is within the field of opportunity within the next two years and can “massively accelerate” innovation.
