Are we living in a brave new world, as Aldous Huxley famously entitled his book ? Perhaps. What sort of new world looms in our future? Albeit we have some clues, actually we don´t know for certain., in this article, dear readers, we endeavor to give you some hints, some food for thought for you.
Arti.ficial intelleigence (AI) was, during the last few decades, the subject of study of sophisticated and highly trained scientists and resarrchers. Sure, their knowledge abouy AI is deep and vast, altough within certain and strict limits.
AI was a mch researched and debated topic in that scientific community, but a misterious and maybe somehow miraculous to the general public; more science fiction than actual science. Not anymore. The recent realease of Chay GPT, an AI chatbot, by Open Source has attracted more than 100 million users in a matter of weeks after it was available for everybody worldwide.
Ai is now a very important subject on the global mainstream debate now. Chat GPT became a household name. The CEO of Open Source, the company that launched the chatbot globally, is Sam Altman, a longitme Silicon Valley charachter who founded the firm in 2015 as non profit organization in 2015, with Elon Musk and others as it backers. It was a non profit outfit, but Microsoft invested in it US$ 1 billion. A 2019 for for profit branch created and Microsoft’s USD $ 10 billion investement later, Open AI as now we know it surfaced in the tech world. The non profit and for profit branches coexisted, not always peacefully. Recently, the revolving firing and sacking of Sam Atman as CEO became a Silicon Valley soap opera, a high tech carousel spinning over and over again. This is al over the news as this article is written, the intrigues unwiding. Soap operas maybe kitsch, but Silicon Valley's soap operas can be amusing and dramatic. Would'nt you agree?
Generative AI and Large Language Models
Chat GPT is an open source AI chatbot. Such devices are trained with texts, images and data all across the whole Internet. Millions and millions of texts ranging from Wikipedia and the Britannica Encyclopedia through all digital libraries to the wide range of social networks are the chatbot’s data learning material. That is why they are named Large Language Models (LLMs). The godmather of this learning method is the pioneer scientist Fei Fei Li, born in Beijing and now a professor at Stanford University.
The LLms are radically changing the way humans search, acquire and gain access to knowldge; not from other humans, but from a chatbot. Wikipedia, at the dawn of the Internet age, was a global project to créate an online encycopedia, wirtten by all those who wished to do so and available to all those that wanted to read. At first, it was flawed and demeed unreliable. Not anymore. Wkipedia has turned 22 years old in 2023, hosts more than 61million articles, written 334 languages , huge amonuts of reliable information, verifed by more than 40,000 editors in the English language alone. Ai chatbots answers to queries are not always accurate and they sometimes suffer “hallucinarions”. We will return to those soon. So, knowlwdge from humans to humans is increasingly being replaced by chatbot providers, which randomly give answers with a mix of accurate and false data.
Chat GPT is not the only AI game in the world. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has “Deep Mind”, a chatbot acquiered from a british tech startup, perfected and optimized later up to Alphabet’s goals. That tech giant has also its Aritificial General Intelligence (AGI) project also. The chief mind behind Google´s AI products and projects, Geoffry Hinton, an AI pioneer, resigned over concerns about the dangers for humanity that AIG may cause.
Meta, another tech giant, is also busy with AI. Some devices are the brain childrenof Marck Zuckerberg’s obssesion with meta-reality. Users may chat with Meta’s AI via Whatsapp, Messeger, Instagram as that chatbot was a real human person, named Llama2. Next in line, are the AI “glasses”, named Ray Ban Meta, and Quest 3.
The question of knowledge is out there. , in search for an answer. What will happen? Your guess is as Good as ours. The answer is in that future “ brave new world”.
Artificial General Inteliigence. Gloom and Glee
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is an advanced type of AI than can perorm all the tasks and dispaly all the capabilities a human beign can. Super Artificial Intelligence can surpass everything a human can do, it even surpasses what current supercomputers can achieve, no matter how powerfull they may be. It will have consciousness, the means to perfect itself or ven reproduce itself. This is not a dream, is a reality beckoning just around the corner.
“The problem is that nobody really knows what is exactly going on inside o fan AI chatbot”, says Will Knight, a higky trained and specialized journalist that has been reporting on AI fr the last 15 years. Hence, the so called “hallucinations” issue mentioned above. As AGI concerns, this not just a minor issue of disinformation. Artificial General Intelligence can be a blessing for humanity or its worst nightmare. Super AIG can be capable of solving pressing existential issues as climate change or the pollution of oceans, or suffer “halucinations” and given the order to solve climate change, it may conculde that as humans cause climate change, they must be wiped of the fase of the earth. This is not a science fiction scenario, lke the Terminator’s film in which intelligent machines are fightinhg humankind to destroy it, as a manner of saying in a sort of wink to a a pop culture dystopia. It is a real possiblity that must be dealt with now. Do you really understand the perils, thus far? Do you understand the great posible advantages to us all, thus far?
AI doomers on one side and AI enthusiasts on the other side, gleeing as heralds of a new Renaissance for humanity contend with each other. Of course, we do not know who is right. Some examples follow.
Gloom
Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning.He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). He says: “ “We think that AGI is comimg sooner that expexted. Socienties are not ready for the power that will be unleashed and the distuptions to come. Misisuse and loosing control of AIG are likey scenarios”
Big tech corporate heavywhiights, reaserchers, scientists as Elon Musk and many others recently signed an open letter proposing to halt AI development for at least 6 months in order to asses AGI risks. They argue theyht be similar to raging global pandemics or a worldwide nuclear conflict.
Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, as we said above. “I am scared that if you make AI the technology work much better, you help the NSA (US National Security Agency) misuse it more. I'd be more worried about that than about autonomous killer AI robots.”
Gleeing about AI
There are those that disagree with the doomers, privately implying that the suffer a kind of “ Frankenstein delusion syndrome” Yann André LeCun is a Turing Award winning French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta. "The apocalyptic claims about AI are preposterous. Safeguards can work. We can hirewire laws and safeguards into AI constraints in a way we cannot do with humans", he argues.
Andreessen Horowitz a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The founders were Silicon Valley veterans turned now into high tech start up financiers. They realesed a manifesto stating that tehcnology and capitalism are the only solution. That is really a way to smuggle unfettered AI tech to the markets. All too natural, because business is profit driven.
Some big power governments are also covert AI enthusiasts. Some big power governments are also convert AI enthusiasts, in spite of the Bletchley Park summit held in november proposing regulations or the recent US Biden Administration AI regulatory directive. AI military capabilities are too enticing. "If China has it, why won't we", the USA may think. "If the USA has it, why won?t we", China could reply.
More to come
This is the first of a series of articles on Artificial Intelligence. Our intention is to adress the ways that AI may affect all aspects of human governance and power; the economy, the consuemers,trade, cand Jobs, to name a few.
We hope that you, dear readers, will join us in this quest.
No comments:
Post a Comment