Sunil Sabharwal is a highly successful, experienced fintech executive, and is currently President of Capitol Tunnels AI as its President. He is an investor and on the boards of Thunes (Singapore), DTOne (UAE) and Finexio (USA). He is also an adviser to the Blackstone Growth Equity Fund. Before, Mr Sabharwal was Chairman of Earthport, a regulated cross-border payments company, which he sold to Visa. He also served as the US board member at the IMF across two administrations, for which he was US Senate-confirmed, and received US Treasury’s Distinguished Service Award. Mr Sabharwal was also Chairman of Ogone, a leading European payment services company, subsequently sold to Ingenico. Before setting up his own firm, he had a career with GE Capital, First Data Corporation, the EBRD and Coopers and Lybrand.
Mr Sabharwal has a long-standing engagement with the Olympic movement as a volunteer leader, including with an International Olympic Committee (IOC) commission, World Athletics, the International Fair Play Committee, and the International Fencing Federation (FIE).
Hall C (Level 2)
Forming Frontier Tech
President of France said ‘we are regulating things that we have not yet produced or invented. It is not a good idea.’ CEO of CB Insights echoed the thought ‘The EU now has more AI regulations than meaningful AI companies.’
The questions:
- The risk of a larger non-EU-based partner using its market power to pull high-potential EU-based AI startups out of the EU. Mistral-Ai proves that risk. Germany’s Aleph Alphi and UK-based Synthesia and StabilityAI too.
- Voluntary flight of startups to non-EU locations including US, in search of capital, and more open to innovation policies. E.g. USA, Japan
- EU-based startups having to develop new code bases if they wish to sell outside of the EU, which means more time, cost, and risk
- Foundation models such as GPT-4 have been termed ‘systemic’. Has this aggressive categorization come too early?
- Need for greater transparency. To publish publicly available summaries of training data which might affect competitiveness and IP
- How does one go about educating citizens of how algorithmic harms happen if citizens have been given more agency to complain about AI systems.