Technology industry leaders issued a warning on Monday: global markets may be overly enthusiastic about the potential of artificial intelligence, overlooking the fact that the technology remains immature, and that cybersecurity is a more urgent short-term issue than AI developing too quickly.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said at an event in Singapore that humans still hold an advantage in many areas of creative work. He noted that people continue to outperform AI in nuanced visual recognition and long-term memory retrieval. At a separate event in Singapore, Microsoft (MSFT) executive Judson Althoff expressed a similar view, calling for rationality.

Leading tech companies have collectively shifted their tone recently. Despite having already invested hundreds of billions of dollars in AI research and infrastructure, companies are starting to lower market expectations, no longer hyping the massive short-term benefits and potential threats of AI.

Speaking at a conference hosted by DBS (D05.SI), Chew said: "On the one hand, I think the technology is not yet at that level. The human brain can do many things that models still cannot achieve."

Major companies are now trying to strike a balance: promoting deployment and selling AI products on one hand, while not wanting the hidden risks of this transformative technology to scare away customers and the public on the other. Althoff, who heads Microsoft (MSFT)'s global commercial business, said at a Microsoft event held in the same city: "I want to distinguish between hype and reality. There is no path where infinite cognitive compute replaces humanity's pursuit of value."

Althoff called on the industry to earn the same level of public trust that people place in a plumber or handyman who comes to their home. In recent weeks, executives from Anthropic and OpenAI joined other corporate leaders at an AI safety meeting convened by U.S. President Trump. Echoing their views, Althoff said: "Observability within the organization, at every layer of the tech stack, is crucial."

Chew, who leads TikTok, one of the world's most influential social platforms, focused on the need to fully recognize the cybersecurity risks brought by AI. He said that as companies race to deploy AI, such short-term risks are "real."