While we love it, this cruise must be getting awfully boring for most of you. So today I'll focus on something weighty, the Artificial Intelligence Arms Race, mostly from an article by Andrew Chow and Billy Perrigo of Time magazine. You can read the details yourself, so I'll only provide some highlights.- Starts poetically with:
T
o create is human. For the past 300,000 years we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing before.
- Then:
Now we have company. While you’re reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. They’re writing pitch decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blueprints, and providing health advice.
- While much of AI is still only coming, this technology is already being used to price products like medicine, assemble cars and determine ads in social media. AI-images have won an art completion and the concept has been applied to films like Everything Everywhere All at Once.
- AI is this next tech breakthrough since social media.
More specifically, GENERATIVE AI tools are changing the nature of searching.- ChatGPT responds creatively to any query. Earlier this year reached 100 million monthly users, faster than TikTok.
- Dall-E allows you to conjure any image you dream up.
- Copilot allows you to turn simple instructions into computer code.
Forecasters predict that AI could boost the global economy by over $15 trillion by 2030.- This is an arms race because all of a sudden, Microsoft, Google and all the biggies are trying to get the necessary edge.
Microsoft will invest $10 billion in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT and Dall-E. You will soon use AI in Office and Bing.- Google has released Bard, a search-oriented chatbot.
But is all this heading for catastrophe?- Growth is being prioritized over safety.
- We just can't imagine the potential consequences. Sort of what I said the other day about CRISPR-Cas9. The tool is there, but should we use it?
- The history:
- Then.
Of course much of the above follows that pattern of providing free service for the sake of capturing the marketplace. How to monetize these services will soon begin to invade by initially offering, say $20/month, to gain access to a higher tier of something like chatbot.- The explicit goal is to create an Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, that can think and learn more efficiently than humans.
Overriding all the above is that existential fear: could AI take over and expunge the human race? A survey last year of researchers said that there will be a 10% chance that this could happen.- Sure, there are a few working on preventing the worst, but they number less than 10% of the field.
- AI's computation power is doubling every 6-10 months. Electrifying...but dangerous.
Even if computer scientists succeed in making sure the AIs don’t wipe us out, their increasing centrality to the global economy could make the Big Tech companies who control it vastly more powerful. They could become not just the richest corporations in the world—charging whatever they want for commercial use of this critical infrastructure—but also geopolitical actors to rival nation-states.
Not much of a day on board the Seabourn Odyssey. We were in Maroe Bay. Lunch.
We had dinner with a friend from Hawaii, Jay. Forgot to take photos of the cuisine, and remembered during dessert. The traditional Baked Alaska the day before the trip ends. Which it will for about the third of the 400 passengers, when we got to Papeete today.
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I've been watching Tropical Cyclone Ilsa about week, when it was on the other side of Australia at 40 MPH. Hit hurricane strength on April 11, shot up to Category 5 status at 150 MPH on April 13, and crashed into a desolate northwest area of the country on Friday the 14th at a monstrous 180 MPH.
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