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

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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

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As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray. For example, it’s become very common to compare powerful A.I.s to genies in fairy tales. The metaphor is meant to highlight the difficulty of making powerful entities obey your commands; the computer scientist Stuart Russell has cited the parable of King Midas, who demanded that everything he touched turn into gold, to illustrate the dangers of an A.I. doing what you tell it to do instead of what you want it to do. There are multiple problems with this metaphor, but one of them is that it derives the wrong lessons from the tale to which it refers. The point of the Midas parable is that greed will destroy you, and that the pursuit of wealth will cost you everything that is truly important. If your reading of the parable is that, when you are granted a wish by the gods, you should phrase your wish very, very carefully, then you have missed the point.

So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America. — Read More

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AI is Silicon Valley’s last-ditch attempt to avoid a stock market wipeout

Silicon Valley has entered the Hail Mary phase of its business cycle — a desertic part of a tech-industry downturn where desperation can turn into recklessness.

The biggest players of the last decade are facing an existential crisis as their original products lose steam and seismic shifts in the global economy force them to search for new sources of growth. Enter generative AI — algorithms like the viral program ChatGPT that seem to mimic human intelligence by spitting out text or images. While everyone in Silicon Valley is suddenly, ceaselessly talking about this new tech, it is not the kind of artificial intelligence that can power driverless cars, or Jetson-like robot slaves, or bring about the singularity. The AI that companies are deploying is not at that world-changing level yet, and candidly, experts will tell you it’s unclear if it ever will be. But that hasn’t stopped the tech industry from trying to ride the wave of excitement and fear of this new innovation.

As soon as it was clear that OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, had a cultural hit, it was off to the races.  Read More

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As artificial intelligence advances, more businesses are interested in AI-powered solutions to improve their marketing efforts. One of the keys to making the most of the tech in marketing is to write effective AI prompts to generate the desired outcomes.

Marketers need to know how to communicate their goals effectively to AI systems. It’s a new skill that requires an understanding of how to write clear, concise, and effective instructions that a machine can understand. — Read More

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About two years ago, I wrote that “it’s difficult to know which ‘intermediate goals’ [e.g. policy goals] we could pursue that, if achieved, would clearly increase the odds of eventual good outcomes from transformative AI.” Much has changed since then, and in this post I give an update on 12 ideas for US policy goals that I tentatively think would increase the odds of good outcomes from transformative AI.

I think the US generally over-regulates, and that most people underrate the enormous benefits of rapid innovation. However, when 50% of the (survey-responding) experts on a specific technology think there is a reasonable chance it will result in outcomes that are “extremely bad (e.g. human extinction),” I think ambitious and thoughtful regulation is warranted. Read More

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Summary.   

What can we do personally to stave off the displacement that may happen as a result of AI? In this article, the authors offer five strategies to future-proof your career in the age of intelligent machines:

1. Avoid predictability. It’s important to remember that AI isn’t generating new insights; it’s a prediction engine that merely guesses the most likely next word.
2. Hone the skills that machines strive to emulate.
3. Double down on “the real world.”
4. Develop your personal brand.
5. Develop recognized expertise in your field.

Even if AI performs “first draft” functions, it still has to be double-checked by a trusted and reliable source. If that’s you, you’ll continue to be sought out because you have the authority to vet AI’s responses. Read More

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62% believe artificial intelligence will have a major impact on jobholders overall in the next 20 years, but far fewer think it will greatly affect them personally. People are generally wary and uncertain of AI being used in hiring and assessing workers

The rapid rise of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems has prompted widespread debates about the effectiveness of these computer programs and how people would react to them. At times, Americans are watching the general spread of AI with a range of concerns, especially when the use of AI systems raises the prospect of discrimination and bias.

One major arena where AI systems have been widely implemented is workplace operations. Some officials estimate that many employers use AI in some form of their hiring and workplace decision-making.

A new Pew Research Center survey finds crosscurrents in the public’s opinions as they look at the possible uses of AI in workplaces.  Read More

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The coming AI battle will reshape the internet and everything else. What will it leave for media?

There’s an epic battle shaping up concerning the future of AI in society. Closely connected are the fortunes of media — how it sustains value in a world overwhelmed by AI information flows. I wanted to explore media’s potential role in future scenarios a bit more, building on previous posts (on chat, and plug-ins) as the future seems to be zooming towards more quickly that I would have expected.

.As I see it, inside of this future, the role media brands play moves beyond content to 1) marks of trust / informational integrity; 2) purveyors of proprietary data sets; 3) connective tissue for groups of communities with shared interests, as such a bridge between digital and offline worlds. The traditional way we think about media as content creator is going to change fundamentally. Some context… Read More

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