Cyprus can benefit enormously from Artificial Intelligence, says AI expert and author Huy Nguyen Trieu in an interview with Politis. Huy Nguyen Trieu, who took part in a recent event organised by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission to mark its 30th anniversary, speaks to Politis about the major developments in artificial intelligence over the past two years, the opportunities and challenges in the labour market, and offers his recommendations on what Cypriot businesses should pay attention to.
What are the most important developments in artificial intelligence over the past two years?
Over the past two years, Artificial Intelligence has moved from very powerful content generation – such as ChatGPT – to strong reasoning capabilities and now to execution capabilities. In other words, Artificial Intelligence can now “think” and also “execute” tasks in a digital world – in the same way that humans would use digital tools such as email, CRM systems or Excel.
This is demonstrated by major breakthroughs such as Open Claw or Mythos, which show that we have entered the Third Wave of Artificial Intelligence.
The labour market
What are the opportunities and challenges for the labour market?
Three patterns are occurring simultaneously in the labour market. Some people are beginning to perform extremely well by leveraging Artificial Intelligence – the superpowered professionals. Others are starting to feel competition from Artificial Intelligence, which is leading to large-scale displacement. And some individuals can now achieve incredible things – such as Demis Hassabis, who accomplished in one year what would otherwise require a billion years of PhD-level research.
For the labour market, there are opportunities to superpower individuals, but the challenge is that Artificial Intelligence also leads to potential unemployment. This is why focusing on “people” is the first priority in the world of Artificial Intelligence.
What is the role of artificial intelligence in financial markets?
Financial institutions have been using Artificial Intelligence for a long time – I was using machine learning for algorithmic trading almost 15 years ago. However, what was once highly specialised has now become widespread across financial services – first in software development, then in customer service, risk management and almost everywhere else.
Financial markets now make extensive use of Machine Learning and Generative Artificial Intelligence and are beginning to adopt Agentic Artificial Intelligence as well, as demonstrated by Citi’s new ARC initiative.
Businesses
What should businesses pay attention to when implementing artificial intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence is evolving extremely fast, and it is difficult for any individual or team to fully understand it, let alone plan everything. At the same time, the opportunities and risks are immense.
My advice to businesses would be to focus on the level that offers the greatest leverage: people. In other words, focus on “creating people who create the future”. The good news is that Artificial Intelligence is now highly accessible to everyone, meaning that anyone can be superpowered.
Mythos
Could you tell us a few words about “Mythos”? Are there cybersecurity risks?
Mythos is a new model from Anthropic that was not supposed to be released yet, but was accidentally disclosed a month ago. That was when the industry realised that Mythos is incredibly powerful and can identify vulnerabilities in almost all operating systems and platforms, as well as generate cyberattacks – entirely on its own, without supervision.
As a result, Mythos poses a potential risk, which is why it has not yet been released and is currently being tested by organisations such as JP Morgan and Google. However, it is very likely that other high-performance models similar to Mythos will be released very soon, so we should not focus only on Mythos.
The future and Cyprus
What is the future of artificial intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence is becoming 10 to 100 times more powerful and 10 to 100 times cheaper every year. The future is Exponential Artificial Intelligence. This means that what we know today will be unimaginably more powerful and cheaper tomorrow.
This represents incredible opportunities – for example in research, productivity and creativity – but also enormous risks, such as cybersecurity, unemployment and the governance of Artificial Intelligence. That is why we – as individuals or organisations – must be the driver of Artificial Intelligence, not the passenger.
How could Cyprus benefit from artificial intelligence?
Cyprus can benefit enormously from Artificial Intelligence. As a small country – in terms of population – Cyprus is constrained by its resources, including human resources. Artificial Intelligence removes this constraint, meaning Cyprus can achieve much more thanks to Artificial Intelligence.
All that is required is the development of human talent – in other words, “creating the people who create the future”. The good news is that this requires very little investment, while the potential impact can be truly significant – and I believe Demis Hassabis, who is of Cypriot origin, could not be a better symbol of what this means for Cyprus.
Info
Demis Hassabis (Demosthenis) is a British artificial intelligence researcher, neuroscientist and co-founder of DeepMind, with Cypriot heritage on his father’s side. In 2024, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with David Baker and John Jumper for their contribution to predicting protein structures through AlphaFold.
