Debates are raging around the world about how artificial intelligence should be developed. Some are calling for strengthened guardrails to guarantee the powerful technology is developed safely, while others argue that doing so would risk kneecapping a fast-moving industry.

But that is a false dichotomy, according to Jack Jiang, an innovation and information management professor at Hong Kong University (HKU) Business School. He said AI safety and development are two sides of the same coin because AI is only economically valuable if it is reliable – and reliability, in his view, must be proven by third parties.

“We are like auditors,” Jiang said in an interview with the Post. For the past two years, he has evaluated the capabilities of dozens of leading AI models as the director of the HKU Business School’s AI Evaluation Lab, launched just a few months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world.

At the time, existential angst among Chinese tech giants had kick-started the “hundred models war”, each competing to stand out from the crowd as they wondered whether China would ever catch up with the US.

That rapid proliferation of international and Chinese AI models made it clear to Jiang that the business community would need help sorting out the good from the bad. “The choice for businesses was no longer a matter of whether or not to use AI, but rather how to use it and how best to use it,” he said.