This year in AI: my top 10

One year with Generative AI in the zeitgeist

DALL-E Generated: I guess this is the way Generative AI sees itself. Or are we looking at the mirror?

This week marked the first anniversary of ChatGPT. Here are my top 10 takes of a whirlwind year:

1. AI is not intelligent. Courtesy of Jaron Lanier.

2. This is just the beginning. The race is on for who will join the Magnificent 7 (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla).  Who thought of Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face, or even OpenAI as contenders more than a year ago? Tune in for the OpenAI board saga series on your preferred streaming service.

3. Are large language models (the engine behind generative AI) a thing of the past? Think Liquid Neural Networks, Objective Driven AI, GFlowNets, etc.

4. Fears of an AI-driven apocalypse are overblown and a distraction from real present issues. But safeguards are needed. The system will not take over the world but can be very poorly designed.

5. We are the AI that we make and should be responsible for it.

6. The Supreme Court has spoken: “we’re a court, we really don’t know these things…these are not like, the nine greatest experts on the Internet...isn’t that something for the Congress to do, not the Court?”

7. Can we regulate AI? Should we regulate AI? Who will regulate AI? How will we regulate AI? Voluntary Commitments, EU AI Act, White House AI Executive Order, UK Safety Summit, …

8. Labor pushes back as tech-driven change accelerates (United Auto Workers Strike and EVs, Writers Guild of America & SAG-AFTRA together navigating AI and the workplace in Hollywood, and more).

9. Being biliterate: we need STEM, but there are major societal issues in play that require a strong liberal arts foundation. We need to get this right for the sake of the future generations and, by investing in early digital and AI literacy we can prepare today’s youth to shape a better future.

10. “Time to summon ourselves!” Humanity wins, courtesy of Sherry Turkle.

Welcome to the rest of our lives!

What would you add to this list?