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IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says that, despite the Trump administration\u2019s attacks on globalism<\/a>, global trade isn\u2019t dead. In fact, he thinks that the U.S.\u2019s key to growth will be embracing an international exchange of goods.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, I actually am a firm believer \u2014 I think it goes all the way back to the economists who studied global trade in the 1800s \u2014 and I think their perspective was, every 10% increase in global trade leads to a 1% increase in local GDP,\u201d Krishna said during an onstage interview at SXSW on Tuesday. \u201cSo, if we want to really optimize even for local [growth], you got to have global trade.\u201d<\/p>\n Global trade goes hand in hand with allowing overseas talent to flow into the U.S., Krishna said. The administration and its allies have called for increased restrictions on student<\/a> and H-1B work visas<\/a>, which they claim put U.S. citizens at a disadvantage.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want people to come here and bring their talent with them and apply that talent,\u201d Krishna said. \u201cAnd we want to develop our own talent as well, but you can\u2019t develop it as well if you\u2019re not bringing the best people from across the world for our people to learn from too. So we should be an international talent hub, and we should have policies that go along with that.\u201d<\/p>\n During the wide-ranging interview, Krishna touched on not only geopolitics but also AI, which he thinks is a valuable technology \u2014 but no panacea.<\/p>\n He disagreed with a recent prediction from Dario Amodei<\/a>, the CEO of Anthropic, that 90% of code may be written by AI in the next three to six months.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the number is going to be more like 20-30% of the code could get written by AI \u2014 not 90%\u201d Krishna said. \u201cAre there some really simple use cases? Yes, but there\u2019s an equally complicated number of ones where it\u2019s going to be zero.\u201d<\/p>\n Krishna said he thinks AI will ultimately make programmers more productive, boosting their and their employers\u2019 outputs rather than eliminating programming jobs, as some AI critics have predicted. <\/p>\n \u201cIf you can do 30% more code with the same number of people, are you going to get more code written or less?\u201d he said. \u201cBecause history has shown that the most productive company gains market share, and then you can produce more products, which lets you get more market share.\u201d<\/p>\n Granted, IBM has a vested interest in presenting AI as nonthreatening. The company sells a range of AI-powered products and services, including assistive coding tools. <\/p>\n The statements are also a bit of a reversal for Krishna, who said in 2023 that IBM planned to pause hiring<\/a> on back-office functions that the company anticipated it could replace with AI tech.<\/p>\n Krishna compared the debates over AI replacing workers to early debates over calculators and Photoshop replacing mathematicians and artists. He acknowledged that there are \u201cunresolved\u201d challenges around intellectual property where it concerns AI training and outputs, but that ultimately, the tech is a positive \u2014 and augmenting \u2014 force. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a tool,\u201d Krishna said of AI. \u201cIf the quality that everybody produces becomes better using these tools, then even for the consumer, now you\u2019re consuming better-quality [products].\u201d<\/p>\n This tool will get cheaper, Krishna predicted. While he noted that reasoning models like OpenAI\u2019s o1<\/a> require lots of computing and thus are energy-intensive, he thinks that AI will use \u201cless than 1%\u201d of the energy it\u2019s using today thanks to emerging techniques like those demonstrated by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI think DeepSeek gave us a preview that you can live with a much smaller model,\u201d Krishna said. \u201cNow the question arises still, do you still need some really big models to start from? And I think that is what [DeepSeek] didn\u2019t talk about.\u201d<\/p>\n But while AI will commoditize, Krishna isn\u2019t convinced that it\u2019ll help humanity arrive at new knowledge, echoing a recent essay<\/a> by Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf. Rather, Krishna thinks quantum computing \u2014 a technology IBM is heavily invested in, not for nothing \u2014 will be the key to accelerating scientific discovery. <\/p>\n \u201cAI is learning from already-produced knowledge, literature, graphics, and so on,\u201d Krishna said. \u201cIt is not trying to figure out what is going to come\u00a0\u2026 I am one who does not believe that the current generation of AI is going to get us towards what is called artificial general intelligence\u00a0\u2026 when the AI can have all knowledge be completely reliable and answer questions beyond those that were answerable by Einstein or Oppenheimer or all the Nobel Prize laureates put together.\u201d<\/p>\n Krishna\u2019s assertions stand in contrast to those from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has argued that \u201csuperintelligent<\/a>\u201d AI is within the realm of possibility within the next few years and could\u00a0massively accelerate innovation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n