The debate about regulating AI urgently needs input from the global south.

The artificial intelligence race is gathering pace, and the stakes could not be higher. Major corporate players—including Alibaba, DeepMind, Google, IBM, Microsoft, OpenAI, and SAP—are leveraging huge computational power to push the boundaries of AI and popularize new AI tools such as GPT-4 and Bard. Hundreds of other private and non-profit players are rolling out apps and plugins, staking their claims in this fast-moving frontier market that some enthusiasts predict will upend the way we work, play, do business, create wealth, and govern.

Amid all the enthusiasm, there is a mounting sense of dread. A growing number of tech titans and computer scientists have expressed deep anxiety about the existential risks of surrendering decision-making to complex algorithms and, in the not so distant future, super-intelligent machines that may abruptly find little use for humans. A 2022 survey found that roughly half of all responding AI experts believed there is at least a one in 10 chance these technologies could doom us all. Whatever the verdict, as recent U.S. congressional testimony from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reveals, AI represents an unprecedented shift in the social contract that will fundamentally redefine relations between people, institutions, and nations. — Read More

Tech bubbles are bad information environments.

Technology bubbles can pose difficult quandaries for business leaders: They may feel pressure to invest early in an emerging technology to gain an advantage over competitors but don’t want to fall for empty hype. As we enter a period of greater economic uncertainty and layoffs in multiple industries, executives are grappling with questions about where to cut costs and where to invest more.

The rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence and machine learning poses a particular challenge to business decision makers. Investments in proven predictive models are increasingly seen as sound and are expected to drive an increase in spending on AI from $33 billion in 2021 to $64 billion in 2025. But further out on the cutting edge, generative AI is sparking a huge amount of noise and speculation. — Read More

Roughly every decade, technology makes a giant leap that erases the old rules and wipes out our assumptions. The Internet. Mobile. Video. Blockchain. Like clockwork, companies and creators begin a mad race to make money off the next big thing, burning through ungodly sums of cash in the process.

Unless you’ve been living off the grid for the past year, it’s clear that the next big thing is artificial intelligence (AI). Early in 2023, ChatGPT is the tool du jour. Spend a few minutes on Twitter and you’ll see people gushing over its ability to write screenplays, debug code, or tell you how to make dairy-free mac and cheese.

Giving anybody with WiFi the ability to churn out unlimited amounts of (mostly) accurate information on demand is a sci-fi level feat. But how can companies leverage the technology behind GPT — and AI in general — to solve substantive problems and expand their product market fit?

That’s the million (or trillion) dollar question. — Read More

No, AGI isn’t going to take over every social system when GPT5 comes out

I don’t talk much about this – I obtained one of the first FDA approvals in ML + radiology and it informs much of how I think about AI systems and their impact on the world. 

… Geoffrey Hinton was one of the loudest voices decrying the decline of radiology 5 years, and now he’s crying fear for new AI systems.

There’s a lot to unpack for both why Geof was wrong, and why his future predictions should not be taken seriously either.  — Read More

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes the future top company in artificial intelligence will likely have created a personal digital agent that can perform certain tasks for people.

The technology will be so profound, it could radically alter user behaviors. “Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” he said.

This yet-to-be developed AI assistant will be able to understand a person’s needs and habits and will help them “read the stuff you don’t have time to read,” Gates said Monday during a Goldman Sachs and SV Angel event in San Francisco on the topic of artificial intelligence. — Read More

Last week a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, said out loud what many in Silicon Valley must have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Big Tech’s grip on AI.

New open-source large language models—alternatives to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers and app developers can study, build on, and modify—are dropping like candy from a piñata. These are smaller, cheaper versions of the best-in-class AI models created by the big firms that (almost) match them in performance—and they’re shared for free. — Read More