Why generative AI is both exciting and terrifying

Simon Greenman is a leading artificial intelligence speaker whose insights bridge decades of technological innovation with practical understanding.

From founding one of the first internet mapping pioneers to advising on the cutting edge of AI policy, his career is defined by both bold vision and real-world impact.

Audiences hear from someone who has seen the dawn of the web and now shapes what comes next in generative AI.

Simon’s talks explore not just what AI can do but what it should do – addressing regulation, ethical risk, and how businesses can build trust in tools that learn and generate.

He lays out the challenges of bias, transparency and accountability side by side with the opportunities for creativity, productivity and societal benefit. It’s this dual focus that makes his message resonate in boardrooms, academic halls and tech summits alike.

In this exclusive interview with The SpeakOut Agency, Simon breaks down how AI is evolving our working lives, why generative tools are rewriting what humans once believed was uniquely theirs and what we must do now to harness the future responsibly.

Q1. In your own words, how do you define AI and generative AI?

Simon Greenman: “AI is about replicating sort of human intelligence. It might be replicating perceiving, seeing, hearing, reasoning, learning and problem solving.

“AI has sort of been broken into many branches, but there’s a type of AI called narrow intelligence which really focuses on a specific task or problem.

“So, for example, it could be focused on in the HR department reviewing CVs, or it could be reviewing MRI scans to detect cancer. That’s sort of narrow AI intelligence.

“And then we’ve also got another view of AI which is called artificial general intelligence, and that gets a lot of the attention. That’s about creating machines that possess all of our human-like capabilities. They can do things like common sense, they can learn, and they almost become as intelligent across all of our cognitive abilities.

“But the past 10 years of AI has been interesting. It’s been really focused on things like predictions – predicting the right CV that we’re working at organisationally, predicting the MRI scan. But then what happened last December 2022 is OpenAI from San Francisco launched ChatGPT, and ChatGPT has sort of caught the public imagination.

“What it is, is it’s generative AI, and it moves from doing predictions to generating content. So, generative AI, for example, can generate text, it can do images, it can do videos, it can even do things like music and knowledge management. 

“These tasks are what we as humans considered really something that is unique to us. Our human nature is about creativity, and it became quite scary that suddenly these machines, ChatGPT and generative AI, could do things that we thought would be the preserve of us.

“So that’s generative AI. But AI is really, in many respects, a technology – it’s tools. It is a general-purpose technology that enables so many things. AI is enabling.

“It enables you to do applications from marketing to sales to customer service, and AI enables you to build applications across industries – from pharmaceuticals to financial services to technology to education. AI is very much something that is going to be spread across industry, functions, technology and society.”

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Q2. What were some of the challenges you faced while starting one of the first internet companies, MapQuest?

Simon Greenman: “My question was one of the first internet brands, and we launched that back in early 1996.

“What it did is it provided an online mapping service where you could get driving directions – so, how do I drive between Leicester and Colchester, for example? You could also get a map by just typing in an address – show me an address at a certain street location.

“It really started to bring to life, for so many people, the power of the internet. Everyone needs maps, everyone needs directions. It’s a problem almost as old as time, but suddenly you could just go onto the internet, type in www.mapquest.com, and get up a map and driving directions.

“The reaction from people was just sort of ‘wow’ – a really visceral response to it – and it brought to life the power of the internet.

“But the challenge was, back in 95/96, there weren’t that many users of the internet. Back then there were maybe 40 million users globally, and today there are over 5 billion users. But what happened is there were very few internet sites, so all of those early users saw the power of MapQuest and started using it.

“When we launched it, I remember being there at 6am on February 5, 1996, when we pushed the on button, and suddenly all of those users started coming to us and we had this huge demand.

“What happened is the service actually crashed on day one because we had so many people coming to it, even though there was a small population of internet users compared to today.

“We ran out of bandwidth, our internet pipes weren’t big enough, and then we ran out of computer power as well because we needed a lot of computer power to actually draw the maps and put them back up on the episode. So we had a real scale problem back in the day.

“We were actually launched in the US in a small town called Lancaster, Pennsylvania, known for the Amish and the movie Witness. But it’s not known for bandwidth and computers. So we had to move the company fairly quickly because there was so much demand. 

“We moved it to Denver, Colorado, where we could get pretty much unlimited computer bandwidth because all the train tracks went through Denver, and that’s where all the telegraph wires were laid, then the telephone wires, then the internet cables.

“We were overwhelmed with demand and had to move the company and make sure we could keep the service going. But back in the 90s, this was before Google launched, when Yahoo and AOL and some of the early brand names were tiny companies.

“Even getting staff who knew about the internet and computer programmers who knew about it was a challenge because it was so new. It was the early frontier days – but exciting at the same time.”

This exclusive interview with Simon Greenman was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.

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