How AI can lift the world more than electricity or the internet

The rise of artificial intelligence in general, now considered inevitable in Silicon Valley, will bring change “to a greater degree” than anything in the world, observers say. never seen. But are we ready?

AGI—defined as artificial intelligence with human perception, as opposed to more narrow artificial intelligence, such as the now-contemporary ChatGPT—which can free people from mundane tasks and usher in an era of creativity new.

But such a shift in historical patterns could also threaten jobs and give rise to insurmountable social problems, experts warn.

Siqi Chen, chief executive officer of San Francisco startup Runway, said previous technological advances from electricity to the internet have triggered dramatic social change.

“But what we’re looking at now is intelligence itself… This is the first time we’ve been able to generate intelligence on our own and increase its number in the universe,” he told AFP. .

As a result, the change will be “by orders of magnitude greater than any other technological change we’ve had in history.”

And such an exciting, terrifying change is a “double-edged sword,” says Chen, envisioning using AGI to tackle climate change, for example, but also warns that it is a tool that we want to be “as manoeuvrable as possible”.

It was the release of ChatGPT late last year that brought the long-dreamed of AGI idea closer to reality.

OpenAI, the company behind the software that generates essays, poems and computer code on command, this week released an even more powerful version of the technology that powers it—GPT-4.

It says the technology will not only be able to process text but also images and create more complex content like legal claims or video games.

As a result, it “represents human-level performance” on several benchmarks, the company said.

Goodbye ‘hard work’

The success of OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has sparked an arms race in Silicon Valley as tech giants seek to push their innovative AI tools to the next level—even though they remain wary of chatbots going off track.

Currently, the AI-powered digital assistants from Microsoft and Google can summarize meetings, draft emails, create websites, create ad campaigns, and more—giving us a glimpse of the possibilities. future capabilities of AGI.

“We spend too much time on this hard work,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft.

With artificial intelligence, Spataro wants to “rediscover the soul of work,” he said during a Microsoft presentation on Thursday.

Artificial intelligence could also cut costs, some suggest.

British landscape architect Joe Perkins tweeted that he used GPT-4 for a coding project that a “very good” developer told him it would cost £5,000 ($6,000). and took two weeks.

“GPT-4 delivered the same in 3 hours, for $0.11,” he tweeted. “It’s really a mess of the mind.”

But that raises questions about the threat to human jobs, with the entrepreneur Chen admitting that the technology could one day build a startup just like his — or an even better version.

“How will I make a living and not be homeless?” he asked, adding that he was expecting solutions to emerge.

existential question

Pervasive artificial intelligence also calls into question the authenticity of creation as songs, images, artwork, etc. are generated by software instead of humans.

Will people shun education, relying instead on software to think for them?

And, who can be trusted to make AI objective, accurate, and adaptable to different countries and cultures?

Sharon Zhou, co-founder of a broad AI firm, said AGI “could come to us faster than we can handle”.

She told AFP that the technology raises a question about humanity’s existence.

“If there’s going to be something stronger than us and smarter than we are, what does that mean for us?” Chu asked.

“And do we exploit it? Or does it exploit us?”

OpenAI said it plans to build AGI gradually with the aim of benefiting all of humanity, but it has acknowledged that the software has safety flaws.

Safety is a “process,” OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said in an interview with MIT Technology Review, adding that companies are “very eager” to come up with some sort of process for allowing slower release of models with these completely unprecedented capabilities.”

But for now, Zhou said, slowing down is not part of the ethos.

“Power is concentrated around people who can make this stuff. And they make decisions around this and they tend to move fast,” she said.

She suggests that the international order itself may be at stake.

“The pressure between the US and China is huge,” Zhou said, adding that the artificial intelligence race is reminiscent of the Cold War era.

“There’s certainly a risk with AGI that if one country figured it out faster, would they dominate?” she asked.

“And so I think the scary thing is, don’t stop because we can’t lose.”

© 2023 AFP