AI webinar puts the intelligence in artificial intelligence

On September 20^th, host Janne Kauhanen sat down with two of Finland’s global cyber security experts, Tomi Tuominen and Mikko Hyppönen, to discuss a topic that is absolutely everywhere right now: artificial intelligence.

However, this was no ordinary webinar. It was designed to give businesses a heads-up about why the AI explosion is happening now, how they can harness its fearsome potential and whether cyber security is in the right place to deal with the inevitable attacks that will be placed upon it.

“I think the AI revolution is bigger than the Internet revolution,” said Hyppönen straight off the bat, setting the tone for the 60-minute conversation. “This is something we have to take very seriously. The companies who embraced the change from local systems to global systems reaped the benefits for years. AI, like the Internet, will bring more upsides than downsides,” he continued.

Other issues that were highlighted throughout the session, which was attended by a huge number of interested parties, included the issue of copyright and intellectual property, the rise of prompt engineers (which host Kauhanen elegantly referred to as ‘AI whisperers), who should be in charge of regulation, and the thorny problem of morality in AI.

The team moved on to discuss where AI will go in the future and what it will mean for us all, as well as the unlimited potential that comes along with this game-changing technology.

“The speed might not increase, but the scale will. This is the biggest shift in market share that we have ever seen,” Tuominen declared, before going on to say: “Don’t look at the things that are easy to solve. For example, are there things in our business that are really expensive to run? Can we scale this and solve bigger problems?”

As a cyber security company, the conversation inevitably turned to how we are supposed to protect ourselves from artificial intelligence. Hyppönen was keen to point out that WithSecure has been studying the subject since 2005, when the company set up its first malware detection machine learning engines, so this has not caught us by surprise. However, for the moment it is a waiting game until both attack and defense become automated.

Tuominen then mentioned that AI will also revolutionize software, as we will be able to ask programming languages to create new, safe, AI-powered languages that guarantee software is free of traditional security vulnerabilities.

An extensive Q&A session followed, during which a range of excellent questions were put to the panel. The audience was keen to hear how AI will impact more traditional industries, as well as how we approach software freedom, and the skill sets needed to be able to work with AI.

When asked to sum up the subject, both experts had a positive outlook.

“Good AI will beat bad AI, but don’t expect quick and easy wins. This will be a long revolution and we must take the downsides seriously. However, this will teach us to be better humans; I’m excited.” Hyppönen concluded.

“Don’t be afraid, embrace it. I don’t believe we are all doomed – eventually, good things will happen,” agreed Tuominen.

If you missed the live webinar, you can get the full experience by watching the webinar recording!