The emergence of artificial intelligence is to transform the Internet industry and social networking over the next decade, Russia's leading web tycoon said in an interview on December 28.
The low-profile Yury Milner, chairman in the rapidly expanding Mail.ru Internet firm and CEO of DST Global investment company who built minority stakes in Facebook and other Western firms, made the comments in an rare interview with Vedomosti.
"When you receive a question, you will not know if it has been asked by a person or an artificial intelligence. And by answering you help the computer create an algorithm."
Mail.ru, which is part owned by Russian magnate Alisher Usmanov and recently enjoyed a solid IPO in London, has grown into the biggest Internet firm in the Russian-speaking world with stakes in the most prominent portals.
He defended the company's tight focus on consumer Internet products, and in particular social Internet, saying that "we have chosen a strategy to have a global expertise in a very narrow sector."
He said that in every Internet sector, there was a tendency for one single firm to become dominant, as with Facebook in social networking in the English-speaking world. "On the Internet there is a tendency for 'winner takes all' and a leader emerges in every niche with surprising consistency," he said.