He said artificial intelligence (AI)-powered fraud was projected to reach 350 billion between 2023 and 2027 globally.

Olatunji Igbalajobi, an expert, says the advent of artificial intelligence into the cyber space has introduced new challenges in cybersecurity.

Speaking to journalists in an interview in Lagos on Sunday, the cybersecurity expert said the advancements in AI were good, but carried implications for the country.

He said artificial intelligence (AI)-powered fraud was projected to reach 350 billion between 2023 and 2027 globally.

Mr Igbalajobi, a member of the Board of Trustees, Cyber Security Experts Association of Nigeria (CSEAN), spoke about the implications of the growing knowledge and embrace of artificial intelligence around the world, with Nigeria not being left behind.

The expert said AI-driven attacks were more adaptable and could bypass traditional security measures. He added that this evolution in cybercrime tactics made defending against these threats more complex and demanding.

According to him, there are different methods of attacks within the AI application and environment, which include data poisoning attacks and model evasion attacks, among others.

AI poisoning attack occurs when threat actors inject malicious or corrupted data into training data sets, aiming to cause the AI to produce inaccurate results.

Model evasion attacks, on the other hand, when attackers feed the AI with contradictory examples in order to create inaccurate predictions, he said.

He said this showed there was a need to prepare for what was coming, noting that lots of cyber attacks were on the way and if care was not taken, it would result in financial impacts.

The expert also noted that the Nigerian Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) had been calling the attention of organisations in the supply chain and manufacturing industry to consider cyber security an integral part of their organisations.

He explained that with this awareness, they were beginning to get info on how cyber attacks happened and how their industry could also be susceptible.

On reasons cybersecurity adoption was slow, he said Nigerians were more reactive than proactive, noting that most organisations waited to experience cyber attacks before doing the needful.

The expert noted that the cost of mitigating cyber attacks was usually outrageous, noting that companies ended up spending triple the amount that should have been used to prevent it.

Mr Igbalajobi also explained that the public-private partnership sector-driven collaboration was still not where it should be, saying that the country had some international partnerships with notable organisations worldwide, who were trying to invest in Nigeria’s cybersecurity.

The expert said these countries, which included the UK and U.S., among others, were trying to see the opportunities Nigeria and Africa at large could present in cybersecurity.

He urged the government to look into the area of limited funds, access to skill and technology, skilled workforce in terms of talent shortage, continuous training and infrastructural limitations to bridge the gap in cybersecurity.

According to him, there is no doubt that Nigeria has a growing alignment of expertise, but the challenge in the country is losing most cybersecurity experts to the Western world.

Most of them opt to go abroad because the environment there is more competitive and favourable for the job.

It is quite unfortunate that we are losing our experts to the global community, Mr Igbalajobi said.

He added that the number of cybersecurity professionals leaving Nigeria would increase as long as the economic, political, and social situation in Nigeria did not improve.

The cyber security expert, however, said there was a good number of alignment with government regulatory agencies, such as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

Mr Igbalajobi noted that the regulation CBN had put in place had helped the financial sector to be on its toes and up-to-date in protecting its institutions with cyber security programmes.

Nigeria has been identified with having one of the lowest numbers of cybersecurity experts, signalling a pressing need for enhancing digital security within the nation.

According to a global report, as of 2023, Nigeria has a mere 8,352 professionals.

Toronto, (APP – UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News – 23rd Jun, 2024) For a few days, AI chip juggernaut Nvidia sat on the throne as the world’s biggest company, but behind the its staggering success are questions on whether new entrants can stake a claim to the artificial intelligence bonanza.

Nvidia, which makes the processors that are the only option to train generative AI’s large language models, is now Big Tech’s newest member and its stock market takeoff has lifted the whole sector.

Even tech’s second rung on Wall Street has ridden on Nvidia’s coattails with Oracle, Broadcom, HP and a spate of others seeing their stock valuations surge, despite sometimes shaky earnings.

Amid the champagne popping, startups seeking the attention of Silicon Valley venture capitalists are being asked to innovate — but without a clear indication of where the next chapter of AI will be written.

When it comes to generative AI, doubts persist on what exactly will be left for companies that are not existing model makers, a field dominated by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

Most agree that competing with them head-on could be a fool’s errand.

I don’t think that there’s a great opportunity to start a foundational AI company at this point in time, said Mike Myer, founder and CEO of tech firm Quiq, at the Collision technology conference in Toronto.

Some have tried to build applications that use or mimic the powers of the existing big models, but this is being slapped down by Silicon Valley’s biggest players.

What I find disturbing is that people are not differentiating between those applications which are roadkill for the models as they progress in their capabilities, and those that are really adding value and will be here 10 years from now, said venture capital veteran Vinod Khosla.

– ‘Won’t keep up’ –

The tough-talking Khosla is one of OpenAI’s earliest investors.

Grammarly won’t keep up, Khosla predicted of the spelling and grammar checking app, and others similar to it.

He said these companies, which put only a thin wrapper around what the AI models can offer, are doomed.

One of the fields ripe for the taking is chip design, Khosla said, with AI demanding ever more specialized processors that provide highly specific powers.

If you look across the chip history, we really have for the most part focused on more general chips, Rebecca Parsons, CTO at tech consultancy Thoughtworks, told AFP.

Providing more specialized processing for the many demands of AI is an opportunity seized by Groq, a hot startup that has built chips for the deployment of AI as opposed to its training, or inference — the specialty of Nvidia’s world-dominating GPUs.

Groq CEO Jonathan Ross told AFP that Nvidia won’t be the best at everything, even if they are uncontested for generative AI training.

Nvidia and (its CEO) Jensen Huang are like Michael Jordan… the greatest of all time in basketball. But inference is baseball, and we try and forget the time where Michael Jordan tried to play baseball and wasn’t very good at it, he said.

Another opportunity will come from highly specialized AI that will provide expertise and know-how based on proprietary data which won’t be co-opted by voracious big tech.

Open AI and Google aren’t going to build a structural engineer. They’re not going to build products like a Primary care doctor or a mental health therapist, said Khosla.

Profiting from highly specialized data is the basis of Cohere, another of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups that pitches specifically-made models to businesses that are skittish about AI veering out of their control.

Enterprises are skeptical of technology, and they’re risk-averse, and so we need to win their trust and to prove to them that there’s a way to adopt this technology that’s reliable, trustworthy and secure, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez told AFP.

When he was just 20 and working at Google, Gomez co-authored the seminal paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced Transformer, the architecture behind popular large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4.