Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. How it is being applied—and, perhaps more importantly, regulated—are now the crucial questions to ask. Walter Isaacson speaks with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt about A.I.’s impact on life, politics, and warfare, as well as what can be done to keep it under control.
Originally aired on March 23, 2023.
Major support for Amanpour and Company is provided by the Anderson Family Charitable Fund, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim, III, Candace King Weir, Jim Attwood and Leslie Williams, Mark J. Blechner, Bernard and Denise Schwartz, Koo and Patricia Yuen, the Leila and Mickey Straus Family Charitable Trust, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Katz and Beth Rogers, the Filomen M. D’Agostino Foundation and Mutual of America.
IN THE NEAR FUTURE, we should anticipate certain technological developments that will forever change our world. For instance, today’s text-based ChatGPT will evolve to give rise to personal “conversational AI” assistants installed in smart glasses and contact lenses that will gradually phase out smartphones. Technological advances in fields such as AI, AR/VR, bionics, and cybernetics, will eventually lead to “generative AI”-powered immersive neurotechnology that enables you to create virtual environments and holographic messages directly from your thoughts, with your imagination serving as the “prompt engineer.” What will happen when everyone constantly broadcasts their mind?
Can the pursuit of experience lead to true enlightenment? Are we edging towards Experiential Nirvana on a civilizational level despite certain turbulent events?
There is a new catchphrase that some are using when it comes to talking about today’s generative AI. I am loath to repeat the phrase, but the angst in doing so is worth the chances of trying to curtail the usage going forward.
Are you ready?
Some have been saying that generative AI such as ChatGPT is so-called alien intelligence. Hogwash. This kind of phrasing has to be stopped. Here’s the reasons to do so.
Has AI advanced too far and too fast? Does it represent an out-of-control threat to humanity? Some credible observers believe AI may have reached a tipping point, and that if research on the technology continues unchecked, AI could spin out of control and become dangerous.
This article explores how Google responded to ChatGPT by using foundation models and generative AI to create innovative products and improve its existing offerings. It also examines Google’s use of Safe AI when creating new products.
“Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”
We are indeed living in “interesting” times.
Paul Smith-Goodson is the Vice President and Principal Analyst covering AI and quantum for Moor Insights & Strategy. He is currently working on several research projects, one of which is a unique method of using machine learning for highly accurate prediction of real-time and future global propagation of HF radio signals.
“Give it a shot! We think this tool will transform your linguistic-visual process both in terms of creative power and discovery.”
San Francisco-based independent Artificial Intelligence research lab Midjourney unveiled their new “/describe” feature that transforms images into words in a tweet. The company, popular for its AI-fueled ability to create images based on a series of prompts, launched more features including “repeat” and “permutations” for its pro subscribers.
Paul DelSignore, creative technologist and artificial intelligence aficionado, took to Medium to break down how these could benefit users. He envisions a future with better search engine indexing and search functionality as a result of “/describe”.
AInstein robot can respond to inquiries from pupils and even illustrate Albert Einstein’s theory of temporal relativity using a pendulum.
High school students in Cyprus have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) robot that uses ChatGPT to enhance classroom learning.
The Three PASCAL schools’ creation, AInstein, can hold dialogues, produce textual content, and crack jokes, according to an article published on Thursday by Voice of America (VOA).
Schmidt thinks that if the AI sector doesn’t create protections, politicians will have to step in.
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has spoken out against the six-month ban on AI development that some tech celebrities and business executives demanded earlier.
“I’m not in favor of a six-month pause, because it will simply benefit China,” said Schmidt, Google’s first CEO.
Wikimedia Commons.
A halt supported by tech leaders like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, would “simply benefit China,” the former Google CEO told the Australian Financial Review on Thursday.
The last few weeks have been abuzz with news and fears (well, largely fears) about the impact chatGPT and other generative technologies might have on the workplace. Goldman Sachs predicted 300 million jobs would be lost, while the likes of Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk asked for AI development to be paused (although pointedly not the development of autonomous driving).
Indeed, OpenAI chief Sam Altman recently declared that he was “a little bit scared”, with the sentiment shared by OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who recently said that “at some point it will be quite easy, if one wanted, to cause a great deal of harm”.
As fears mount about the jobs supposedly at risk from generative AI technologies like chatGPT, are these fears likely to prevent people from taking steps to adapt?
Poor, poor, Horizon Worlds. According to Facebook-turned-Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, the company’s metaverse of dead-eyed avatars has been all but abandoned by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who, in an added blow, is instead said to be spending the bulk of his time chasing the investor-appeasing Silicon Valley squirrel that is generative AI.
“We’ve been investing in artificial intelligence for over a decade, and have one of the leading research institutes in the world,” Bosworth told Nikkei Asia in an interview on Wednesday. “We certainly have a large research organization, hundreds of people.”
“We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy,” he added. “It’s probably the area that I’m spending the most time [in], as well as Mark Zuckerberg and [Chief Product Officer] Chris Cox.”
Models are scientific models, theories, hypotheses, formulas, equations, naïve models based on personal experiences, superstitions (!), and traditional computer programs. In a Reductionist paradigm, these Models are created by humans, ostensibly by scientists, and are then used, ostensibly by engineers, to solve real-world problems. Model creation and Model use both require that these humans Understand the problem domain, the problem at hand, the previously known shared Models available, and how to design and use Models. A Ph.D. degree could be seen as a formal license to create new Models[2]. Mathematics can be seen as a discipline for Model manipulation.
But now — by avoiding the use of human made Models and switching to Holistic Methods — data scientists, programmers, and others do not themselves have to Understand the problems they are given. They are no longer asked to provide a computer program or to otherwise solve a problem in a traditional Reductionist or scientific way. Holistic Systems like DNNs can provide solutions to many problems by first learning about the domain from data and solved examples, and then, in production, to match new situations to this gathered experience. These matches are guesses, but with sufficient learning the results can be highly reliable.
We will initially use computer-based Holistic Methods to solve individual and specific problems, such as self-driving cars. Over time, increasing numbers of Artificial Understanders will be able to provide immediate answers — guesses — to wider and wider ranges of problems. We can expect to see cellphone apps with such good command of language that it feels like talking to a competent co-worker. Voice will become the preferred way to interact with our personal AIs.
