The Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry (OICCI) hosted Dr. Ali Hasanain, Associate Professor of Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), for a session on “Economic Governance in the Age of AI” on September 30, 2025. He was welcomed to the Chamber by M Abdul Aleem, Secretary General OICCI, along with Executive Director Kashif Shafi and Research Officer Javaria Shaikh Ismail.

Dr. Hasanain shared valuable insights on the current state of large language models (LLMs), their potential impact on labour markets, and the broader implications for jobs, productivity, and policymaking. With Pakistan’s digital economy expanding rapidly and growing interest in adopting AI on a national scale, such discussions are vital to shaping future business strategies and preparing the workforce to work effectively with AI technologies.

Describing AI as “intelligence everywhere, at a low cost,” Dr. Hasanain explained how AI systems recognize patterns and learn to act on them. He noted that since 2010, the datasets used to train AI models have been doubling every six months, leading to unprecedented advances in complexity. “The trouble is that we know very little, and the world is moving very fast,” he remarked, emphasizing that there is no theoretical upper limit to how advanced AI systems can become.

According to Dr. Hasanain, this rapid progress has led many experts to conclude that AI is approaching human-level complexity in problem-solving. However, he also highlighted key challenges that could limit its growth, including soaring energy costs, the shortage of high-quality training data, and the pressing need for rigorous scrutiny to ensure that AI models operate safely and responsibly.