Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration will drive the next era of growth, wealth, and human flourishing. It’s a scary metaphor. Throughout American history, the drive for expansion and the very concept of terrain up for grabs—land grabs, gold rushes, new frontiers—have provided a permission structure for imperialism and exploitation. This could easily hold true for AI.

This isn’t the first time the concept of a frontier has been used as a metaphor for AI, or technology in general. As early as 2018, the powerful foundation models powering cutting-edge applications like chatbots have been called “frontier AI.” In previous decades, the internet itself was considered an electronic frontier. Early cyberspace pioneer John Perry Barlow wrote “Unlike previous frontiers, this one has no end.” When he and others founded the internet’s most important civil liberties organization, they called it the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

America’s experience with frontiers is fraught, to say the least. Expansion into the Western frontier and beyond has been a driving force in our country’s history and identity—and has led to some of the darkest chapters of our past. The tireless drive to conquer the frontier has directly motivated some of this nation’s most extreme episodes of racism, imperialism, violence, and exploitation.

That history has something to teach us about the material consequences we can expect from the promotion of AI today. The race to build the next great AI app is not the same as the California gold rush. But the potential that outsize profits will warp our priorities, values, and morals is, unfortunately, analogous. — Read More

About one-third of American professionals worry that artificial intelligence will make some jobs obsolete, and nearly half fear they could be “left behind” in their careers if they don’t keep up, according to a recent Washington State University survey.

… The survey of 1,200 U.S. professionals found that 48% are concerned they could be left behind in their careers if they don’t have chances to learn more about workplace uses of AI.  – Read More

The Caribbean island is reaping millions from .ai website registrations.

The rising popularity of artificial intelligence has impacted the entire world, including the tiny island of Anguilla. Located in the Caribbean, the country, home to about 15,000 people, has a unique and suddenly in-demand resource.

In the late 1980s, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned countries and regions of geographic interest their own two-letter domains. Anguilla received .ai, a luck of the draw that is now paying dividends as the country registers website domains for AI companies.  – Read More

A Harvard diploma, a PhD, or stint at Google are no longer the best signifiers of the top minds in artificial intelligence. Instead, hirers should look for engineers and researchers with applied AI experience at a group of nine startups that our data shows have the highest concentration of AI talent.

The past seven years have seen a de-credentialization of the AI hiring space as demand for engineering talent in the field explodes. The percentage of AI hires that come from top schools or have PhDs has dropped significantly from a peak in 2015, according to data from SignalFire’s own Beacon AI data platform.   – Read More

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company, announced on Thursday a new generation of embedding models, which can convert text into a numerical form that can be used for various machine learning tasks. The company also introduced new versions of its GPT-4 Turbo and moderation models, new API usage management tools, and lower pricing on its GPT-3.5 Turbo model.  – Read More

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The faster AI automation spreads through the economy, the more profound its potential impacts, both positive (improved productivity) and negative (worker displacement). The previous literature on “AI Exposure” cannot predict this pace of automation since it attempts to measure an overall potential for AI to affect an area, not the technical feasibility and economic attractiveness of building such systems. In this article, we present a new type of AI task automation model that is end-to-end, estimating: the level of technical performance needed to do a task, the characteristics of an AI system capable of that performance, and the economic choice of whether to build and deploy such a system. The result is a first estimate of which tasks are technically feasible and economically attractive to automate – and which are not. We focus on computer vision, where cost modeling is more developed. We find that at today’s costs U.S. businesses would choose not to automate most vision tasks that have “AI Exposure,” and that only 23% of worker wages being paid for vision tasks would be attractive to automate. This slower roll-out of AI can be accelerated if costs falls rapidly or if it is deployed via AI-as-a-service platforms that have greater scale than individual firms, both of which we quantify. >Overall, our findings suggest that AI job displacement will be substantial, but also gradual – and therefore there is room for policy and retraining to mitigate unemployment impacts.  – Read More

Rose-tinted predictions for artificial intelligence’s grand achievements will be swept aside by underwhelming performance and dangerous results.

In the decades to come, 2023 may be remembered as the year of generative AI hype, where ChatGPT became arguably the fastest-spreading new technology in human history and expectations of AI-powered riches became commonplace. The year 2024 will be the time for recalibrating expectations.

Of course, generative AI is an impressive technology, and it provides tremendous opportunities for improving productivity in a number of tasks. But because the hype has gone so far ahead of reality, the setbacks of the technology in 2024 will be more memorable.  – Read More

OpenAI’s GPT Store, where users can share their custom chatbots, finally launched Wednesday after a monthslong delay. The store brings more potential use cases to ChatGPT and expands OpenAI’s ecosystem beyond what the company builds for customers.  – Read More

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