What happens if you miss two weeks of AI news?
It's easy. It's been left in the dust of a news cycle so fast-paced that even ChatGPT would respond, “As an AI language model, we can't keep you up to date on so much AI news.”
This is what happened to me last Friday when I returned from a long-awaited family trip overseas.
Of course, I knew it was risky to remove news apps and social media from my phone and take too much time away from the AI news cycle. After all, the pace of AI development and news creation has steadily accelerated since he joined VentureBeat in April 2022, shortly after I released his OpenAI DALL-E 2. I've been doing it. And in the months since ChatGPT rose to fame almost overnight, it's been like being on a Japanese bullet train with so few stops that no one can get off.
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But my vacation provided a welcome and much-needed break from the AI Twitter buzz and the usual breathless AI headlines. And while I'll admit I did get a little peek at the end of the trip, for the most part I stuck to my guns and avoided the adrenaline rush of daily AI news that I've become accustomed to over the past year. However, when I returned home and researched the digital mountain of information on AI, I found it both overwhelming and fascinating.
Not on my bingo card: Jeffrey Hinton warns of the dangers of AI
One big news story not on my 2023 bingo card was Jeffrey Hinton's May 1 announcement that he was leaving his job at Google so he could speak freely about the risks of AI. According to the New York Times, Mr. Hinton now has some regrets about his life's work, he said.
It's a stark turnaround from when I spoke with Hinton last August for the 10th anniversary of the seminal AlexNet paper that galvanized the deep learning “revolution” that followed. At the time, he was overjoyed with the recent progress of his LLM.
“We're seeing great things that big language models can do, but we thought it was a long way away,” he told me at the time. He added, “Deep learning is very useful when you have large amounts of data and want to make predictions from it. Big companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon rely heavily on deep learning. That's why it's relevant to more or less everything.”
Biden Administration Announces Initiatives to Address AI Risks
It was no surprise that Vice President Kamala Harris and other Biden administration officials met with the CEOs of Alphabet, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Open AI on May 4.
I had already reported on the AI Bill of Rights Blueprint in October and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework released in January, and this conference also built on recent AI regulatory developments. . Most notable is the long-awaited draft EU AI law, which was passed on April 27 and received the necessary votes last week to proceed to the next stage of the legislative process.
And so many new initiatives, including $140 million in funding to launch seven new national AI research institutes, a public evaluation of generative AI systems, and draft policy guidance for the U.S. government's use of AI systems. The fact that it was announced is a recognition that the Biden administration needs to take it seriously. But as the breakneck pace of AI development continues, can they move quickly beyond glittery PR?
Google gets big, OpenAI takes off
What a change since Google's limp troubadour debuted in Paris in February. At the time, Google's muted response to Microsoft's search “competition” with Bing made Google's Transformer neural network architecture, launched in 2017, the gold standard for today's generative AI. Many predicted that generative AI was a missed opportunity. Rush possible.
Last week's Google I/O changed the game. According to his CNBC report this weekend, even Google employees credited engineers for their “quick work” on AI products, citing the fact that the executive had said “AI” to him more than 140 times. He said he was teasing her. Keynote speech at Google I/O. Among other announcements, Google announced upgrades to his Bard to compete with ChatGPT, debuted PaLM 2, its next-generation language model, and released a host of new generative AI features in Google Cloud and Vertex. .
But don't sleep on OpenAI. The company didn't lose last week either. Shortly after landing at JFK Airport on Friday, I received an email from a company spokesperson letting me know that the ChatGPT plugin will be available as a beta version to ChatGPT Plus users this week. The generative AI race (yes, it's a race) continues.
Get ready for another epic AI news week
Still jet-lagged, I woke up early this morning to go through two weeks' worth of emails and prepare for another week of epic AI news. First on my list: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's Congressional testimony tomorrow.
What should I know when getting back on track after the holidays? Feel free to DM or email me on Twitter: @sharongoldman.
Let's go! (Rocky theme music plays in the background)
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