Several decades ago, when the Green movement was getting under way, a panellist in a discussion on British TV said, with a considerable degree of prescience: “The Green movement is just an excuse to sell everybody everything all over again”. Today, much the same could be said about Artificial Intelligence. AI is being promoted to sell everything from washing machines to air conditioners to software to web platforms. Programs which one has used in the past for the most mundane activities – writing text, sending emails, opening and reading documents – have suddenly sprouted an “AI” button in their latest iteration, the use of which is promised to increase one’s output and enrich one’s experience of interacting with the program.
Companies have dived headlong into investing in AI on the premise that it will increase productivity and save money, but there is evidence that the predicted benefits are not so far matching up to the costs incurred. The Bloomberg news site reports that researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a survey conducted in August of this year that 95% of organisations saw zero return on their investment in AI initiatives. More recently, researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities offered a possible explanation for why: “Employees are using AI to create ‘workslop’, which the researchers define as ‘AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task’.”
What the public sees of AI’s potentiality are essentially its most trivial manifestations. The highly publicised “chatbots” which allow anyone to interact with AI systems are used for recreational purposes – planning holidays, creating images and videos, acting as personal companions – not always with beneficial results. There are fears that AI could facilitate the creation of “deep fakes” and the production of misleading political statements purporting to come from reputable sources. Interaction with chatbots has led to some cases of suicide with vulnerable subjects finding their obsessions played back to them in an intensified form.
Despite these drawbacks, investment in AI development and the associated infrastructure is proceeding at breakneck speed. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into the sophisticated chips required by AI computers, into vast datacentres and the power sources required to keep them in operation. With the tangible benefits yet to materialise in the form of profits to the main AI companies, much of this investment is supported by debt, and there are fears that AI is a bubble bound sooner or later to burst and to cause financial damage on the scale of the dotcom crash of the year 2000.
Yet it is clear that the potential benefits of AI are enormous. It can process and analyse vast sets of data rapidly. It can scan medical images at speed, picking up anomalies which escape the human eye and aiding rapid diagnosis. It can write computer code and draft legal documents, in fact there are few areas of activity which make use of data where if used correctly it cannot perform faster and more efficiently than humans. It can also speed scientific research: in 2024 Demis Hassabis, the British founder and CEO of the AI research company Deep Mind, now owned by Google, won the Nobel Prize for Science, along with a colleague John M. Jumper, for an AI model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence – a major goal of computational biology.
The main drawback of current AI models is the vast amounts of computing power which they require, entailing the construction of data centres consuming equally vast amounts of electricity. According to the International Energy Agency, “A typical AI-focused data centre consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, but the largest ones under construction today will consume 20 times as much.” In fact the ability to provide sufficient power may prove one of the limiting factors in the future development of AI in its present form. If the current phase is considered the initial stage of AI implementation, future phases may need to focus on developing forms of data processing which approach the efficiency of the human brain. One such approach is that suggested by research at the FORTH research institute in Heraklion, where scientists in the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology have constructed a computer model which imitates the dendrites which are the brain’s main means of transmitting information. Once successfully developed, the technique could pave the way for more compact and energy-efficient AI systems.
Meanwhile governments worldwide are seeking to harness AI to produce greater efficiency in everything from fighting wars to managing public health systems. In Greece the government is undertaking initiatives to increase productivity, building on the digitisation of government services which was successfully introduced during its first term. The Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has been quick to appreciate the potential benefits of AI in government and is establishing partnerships with major AI companies for a number of pioneer projects.
The school project
One of the most promising fields of application for AI is in education, where there is the prospect that personalised tuition based on AI chatbots could help to democratise education by tailoring the teaching materials provided to the capacities of the individual pupil. The Ministry for Education and Religions, under guidance of the Prime Minister, has instituted an initiative to provide such a system, which is to be trialled in 20 Lykeia round the country, in partnership with Open AI, which runs the chatbot ChatGTP, and the Onassis Foundation, several of whose sponsored Public Onassis Schools are included in the pilot.
On 5th September the Education Ministry hosted an event to present this initiative in Thessaloniki, with the participation of the Education Minister Sofia Zacharaki, the head of the Onassis Foundation Antonis Papadimitriou, the Chief Global Affairs Officer for Open AI Chris Lehane, the Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and, via an internet link from the US, the CEO of Open AI Sam Altman. The tone of the proceedings was generally laudatory, with Greece being praised by the American company’s representatives for its lead in the adoption of AI in both education and business. After a short discussion in which the Prime Minister and Sam Altman shared their views on the most pressing issues facing the adoption of AI in education and more generally, the agreement for the initiation of the project was signed by the Prime Minister, the President of the Onassis Foundation and the representatives of Open AI. A video of the event can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loG5o4FykDM. (The major part of it is in English.)
Looking to the future of AI
On 12th September the Prime Minister also appeared at the Athens Innovation Summit 2025 (https://athensinnovationsummit.org/), an annual event organised by the Greek branch of Endeavor, a non-profit organisation headquartered in New York City which supports entrepreneurs with potential for economic and social impact in their regions. In a conversation staged at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus under the Acropolis in Athens, he and Deep Mind’s Demis Hassabis held a wide-ranging discussion on the theme “The Future of AI, Ethics, and Democracy”. A video of the event, held before an audience of 5,000 business people and chaired by the CEO of Endeavor Linda Rottenberg, can be seen on YouTube, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24YTsT9qa5Q.