10 Quotes Worth Reading about the Future of AI

Within five years everyone would have access to an AI personal assistant. He referred to this function as a personal chief-of-staff. In this vision, everybody will have access to an AI that knows you, is super smart, and understands your personal history. -Venture Beat 

Some experts in generative AI predict that as much as 90% of content on the internet could be artificially generated within a few years. -Bloomberg

Currently, most AI falls under narrow or specialized intelligence — good at one thing but pretty useless otherwise. However, we’re inching closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where machines can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across different domains. -Christophe Atten writing in Medium

It is certainly the case that many new technologies have led to bad outcomes – often the same technologies that have been otherwise enormously beneficial to our welfare. So it’s not that the mere existence of a moral panic means there is nothing to be concerned about.  But a moral panic is by its very nature irrational – it takes what may be a legitimate concern and inflates it into a level of hysteria that ironically makes it harder to confront actually serious concerns.  And wow do we have a full-blown moral panic about AI right now. -Marc Andreesen writing in a16z

All of the software we’ve ever used was engineered to work backward from an outcome. Its creators wanted to help you find a webpage or play a game or operate a laptop. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the major AI chatbots arrived with almost no user documentation or instructions. A lump of clay doesn’t come with instructions either. That’s what makes this moment unique — and so worthy of species-level #1 foam-finger pride. We humans have created a tool for potentially infinite tasks. Its imperfections are ours to solve — and its powers still ours to shape. -Washington Post 

“AI may cause a new Renaissance, perhaps a new phase of the Enlightenment,” Yann LeCun, one of the godfathers of modern artificial intelligence, suggested earlier this year. AI can already make some existing scientific processes faster and more efficient, but can it do more, by transforming the way science itself is done? Such transformations have happened before. -The Economist

DeepMind’s cofounder says generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI: bots that can carry out tasks you set for them by calling on other software and other people to get stuff done. “Technology is going to be animated. It’s going to have the potential freedom, if you give it, to take actions. It’s truly a step change in the history of our species that we’re creating tools that have this kind of, you know, agency.” -MIT Tech Review

What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? First it was chess and Go. Now AI can beat us at Diplomacy, the most human of board games. The way it wins offers hope that maybe AI will be a delight. -Wired

People need to develop “rugged flexibility,” to manage change most effectively. In other words, people need to learn how to be strong and hold on to what is most useful but also to bend and adapt to change by embracing what is new. -Venture Beat

Imagine if your brain got 10 times smarter every year over the past decade, and you were on pace for more 10x compounding increases in intelligence over at least the next five. Throw in precise recall of everything you’ve ever learned and the ability to synthesize all those materials instantly in any language. You wouldn’t be just the smartest person to have ever lived — you’d be all the smartest people to have ever lived. (Though not the wisest.) That’s a plausible trajectory of the largest AI models. -Washington Post 

We seem to be in what I can only call an “AI lull.” The initial excitement about ChatGPT, which started in January, has receded. Do not be deceived. While the hype and marketing may have died down, at least on the retail side, the AI revolution will continue. -Bloomberg