[Music]
How many of you here remember the Y2K problem? There was a lot of talk about the Y2K problem; it was the fear of what would happen as we transitioned from December 31, 1999, to January 1, 2000.
What people feared was that everything run by computers would stop, a digital doomsday, simply put.
But that's not how it went; it went perfectly fine.
In hindsight, it's easy to laugh a bit at such stories, and there are so many of them, but perhaps history still has something to teach us.
A couple of months after we realized the Y2K problem wasn't a problem, the dot-com bubble was at its peak.
Back then, Meta or social media didn't exist at all.
Google existed, but it was an 18-month-old startup, and Amazon was publicly listed, but it was a simple bookstore.
And you might be wondering why I'm telling you this; we're supposed to be talking about artificial intelligence.
We are at the very beginning of this technology.
And so, it might be wise to look back in time.
How did it go the last time we had such a technological revolution?
And if we are to learn anything from the last 20-30 years of technological development, it is that we have no idea how this will evolve, and we barely have the imagination to even conceive of it.
Nor did anyone have the imagination to think that the barely 2 billion kroner, which was the first deposit into the Oil Fund in 1996, would, less than 30 years later, grow to 19,000 billion kroner;
that the returns from the Oil Fund would account for 24% of the state budget, meaning every fourth krone;
and that we own one and a half percent of all publicly listed companies worldwide and are the world's largest sovereign wealth fund.
No one had foreseen that in 1996 either.
It's a bit difficult to keep such a piggy bank hidden, and we don't even try to.
Our goal is to be the world's most open fund, and you can follow the fund's size live on our websites.
But this naturally makes us a target for those with malicious intentions, and my colleagues and I must guard this piggy bank every day, all year round.
And that was difficult enough before artificial intelligence made its entrance.
My boss, Nicolai Tangen, hosts a podcast called 'In Good Company'.
So if you haven't listened to it, I recommend you give it a try, because he interviews the CEOs of the largest companies, and they talk a lot about artificial intelligence.
Let's take a look at this.
AI is, I think, at the beginning of what it can do for us.
AI has so many beneficial uses that if you attempt to partition the world, that could be very, very difficult.
ChatGPT is, arguably, the single best software product the world ever made.
And we regulate cereal, you know, we regulate AI.
When you look at this arms race we are having now in AI, and you know, driven by technology, people are afraid.
To investigate whether our collective wealth can be protected by artificial intelligence, it is then interesting to examine the question: can our collective wealth be attacked by artificial intelligence?
and what would such an attack look like?
And to answer that question, we must first examine what we consider to be the biggest security threats to the Oil Fund.
Financial risk: This includes loss of money or other forms of economic risk.
Imagine if someone managed to steal just 1% of the Oil Fund; that would be the world's most successful heist.
We are also concerned about information leakage.
This could, for example, involve which stocks we plan to buy and sell, or which markets we plan to enter or exit.
And we are also concerned that someone might harm Norway, the country we love so much, and the fund's reputation.
The fund's size and symbolic value make it a potential target for those who wish to harm Norway.
This value also makes us more vulnerable to political risks in an increasingly unstable geopolitical situation.
And finally, here we have supply chain attacks.
and I find that so interesting, especially after the advent of AI.
So I want to dedicate an entire slide to it.
Here we see the top 10 individual companies; these are tech companies and two pharma companies that produce medicine.
And at the bottom here, we have ASML, which develops the machines that make data chips.
A bit further up, we have TSMC, which produces the chips.
and at the top, NVIDIA, which designs, develops, and sells the chips to all the other tech companies we see here on this slide.
These companies have become very closely interconnected, and that represents an entirely new type of vulnerability in the market.
Geopolitical tensions related to Taiwan, new trade opportunities, are all factors that can affect these companies and could have a significant impact on the market we invest in.
This is an entirely new type of risk, and stock markets and geopolitics have become more closely intertwined.
Yes, can our collective wealth be protected by artificial intelligence?
We've talked a bit about the biggest security threats and a vulnerable supply chain.
But how do we use AI in the Oil Fund's security team?
We are still at an early stage, but we have invested significantly in building expertise, and we are strongly committed to staying ahead of this technological wave.
So far, we have become dependent on using AI to streamline our daily work, but we mostly consume AI services through our suppliers.
For example, we analyze all emails with AI to filter out spam and phishing.
Hopefully, when I'm on stage next autumn, I can share some experiences about how we analyze security incidents with AI, because that's a pilot we plan to start in January 2025.
But Mats, who comes on stage after us, will talk a lot about that, so he can cover that part.
Also, but for now, I'll stick to our strategy, which is to reduce the attack surface.
Robustness, and that means we practice restoring our IT systems from scratch in the event of a crisis.
Many, I think, know this film: it's Terminator 2 with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it came out in 1991.
Here, humanity fights against an artificial intelligence organization, Skynet, which has taken over the world.
In the first Terminator film, Skynet sends a killing machine in Arnold's form, a T-800 to be precise, to eliminate an important person in the human resistance movement.
But in the second one, however, Arnold has gone from evil to good; humans have managed to take over one of Skynet's machines and send him to confront another, more modern killing machine, a T-1000.
So here, artificial intelligence fights artificial intelligence, an older version against the newer and more advanced.
We will also reach that point someday, and I don't think that's a particularly bold prediction.
But that's how it will always strictly be: fighting against the malicious use of technology.
We often lag behind and must constantly try to imagine how technology can be used against us.
For us at the Oil Fund, it is entirely possible to be technologically up-to-date.
But how technology is used against us, that is what is challenging, and it is simply an everlasting arms race.
Can our collective wealth be managed by artificial intelligence?
Isn't that an exciting, exciting question?
We, at the Oil Fund, don't use AI because we think it's fun, but because we must participate in this technological race.
But having said that, my colleagues and I at the Oil Fund also find it incredibly fun.
Up until now, we have mainly used quantitative investment strategies to predict returns and risks in the market.
But the developments of recent years show the need for something far more comprehensive.
So, can we predict winners and losers?
I want to tell you about an exciting project we have ongoing at the Oil Fund and how we use AI in our business.
By using AI algorithms, we are investigating whether we can identify new investment opportunities, predict market movements, and optimize the portfolio.
This can lead to better returns and has the potential to change how we manage our collective wealth.
It enables us to identify unexpected companies with potential for value creation.
And I want to emphasize that this project is intended to serve as decision support for our traders, not as decision-makers.
Are we on time? Yes, alright.
And with that, I just want to say thank you very much, and we are now facing a race between good AI and bad AI.
May the best win.