Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on AI’s economic impact: ‘There’s very little that we do where we need frontier models’

David Solomon spent Thursday announcing a $500 million AI push alongside four of the companies building the most powerful models in the world. Then he told the room that most of the economy doesn’t need those models.

“Frontier models and how frontier models develop is going to be a very, very interesting thing,” the Goldman Sachs CEO told the crowd at the launch of the firm’s new Small Business AI Institute at the bank’s headquarters in lower Manhattan, where Fortune was in attendance. “But there’s very little that we do where we need frontier models,” he added, seeming to speak generally of economic activity, in the context of small business.

“The technology is moving very, very quickly, and the technology is going to continue to move quickly,” Solomon said. But “you have to separate at some level” the development of frontier models from the everyday tools businesses actually use, he added.

Frontier models, he said, matter for cybersecurity, for defense and for health care, such as around drug discovery and molecule formation. The security fights and the “bigger picture frontier issues that are getting a lot of attention,” Solomon said, “are really separate from using the base tools that exist to support your businesses.”

The AI institute is part of a new $500 million commitment to fund the next chapter of Goldman’s 10,000 Small Businesses program, which will deliver education, access to capital and support services, according to the bank’s announcement. Nearly 20,000 entrepreneurs have completed the program since it launched in 2010, part of an earlier $1.25 billion commitment. Small businesses make up 99% of U.S. businesses, a “hugely........

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