All posts tagged: opportunities of this groundbreaking technology

Science is becoming less human

Science is becoming less human

Published by skeptic

AI is fueling a revolution in science that may change our definition of understanding itself. Illustration by The Atlantic December 15, 2023, 11:02 AM ET This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here. Artificial intelligence is changing the way some scientists conduct research, leading to new discoveries on accelerated timetables. As The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong explores in a recent article, AI is assisting in drug discovery and more: “Neuroscientists at Meta and elsewhere, for instance, are turning artificial neural networks trained to ‘see’ photographs or ‘read’ text into hypotheses for how the brain processes both images and language. Biologists are using AI trained on genetic data to study rare diseases, improve immunotherapies, and better understand SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern.” But these advances have a drawback. AI, through its inhuman ability to process and find connections between huge quantities of data, is also obfuscating how these breakthroughs happen, by producing results without explanation. Unlike …

AI’s ‘fog of war’ – The Atlantic

AI’s ‘fog of war’ – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here. Earlier this year, The Atlantic published a story by Gary Marcus, a well-known AI expert who has agitated for the technology to be regulated, both in his Substack newsletter and before the Senate. (Marcus, a cognitive scientist and an entrepreneur, has founded AI companies himself and has explored launching another.) Marcus argued that “this is a moment of immense peril,” and that we are teetering toward an “information-sphere disaster, in which bad actors weaponize large language models, distributing their ill-gotten gains through armies of ever more sophisticated bots.” I was interested in following up with Marcus given recent events. In the past six weeks, we’ve seen an executive order from the Biden administration focused on AI oversight; chaos at the influential company OpenAI; and this Wednesday, the release of Gemini, a GPT competitor from Google. What we have not seen, yet, is total catastrophe of …

A Chaotic Week at OpenAI

A Chaotic Week at OpenAI

Published by skeptic

In many ways, this story is just beginning. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source Jim Wilson / The New York Times / Redux. November 22, 2023, 2:01 PM ET This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here. It’s been an unbelievable few days for OpenAI, the influential company behind products such as ChatGPT, the image-generating DALL-E, and GPT-4. On Friday, its CEO, Sam Altman, was suddenly fired by the company’s board. Chaos immediately followed: A majority of the company’s workers revolted, negotiations were held, and now a new agreement has been reached to return Altman to his throne. It’s a tale of corporate mutiny fit for streaming, and we’ve been following it closely at The Atlantic. The turmoil at OpenAI is juicy, yes, but it is not just gossip: Whatever happens here will be of major consequence to the future of AI development. This is a company that has been at odds with itself …

Don’t be fooled by the AI apocalypse

Don’t be fooled by the AI apocalypse

Published by skeptic

A guide to understanding which fears are real and which aren’t Illustration by The Atlantic November 16, 2023, 2:14 PM ET This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here. Executive action, summits, big-time legislation—governments around the world are beginning to take seriously the threats AI could pose to society. As they do, two visions of the technology are jostling for the attention of world leaders, business magnates, media, and the public. One sounds like science fiction, in which rogue robots extinguish humanity or terrorists use AI to accomplish the same. You aren’t alone if you fear the coming of Skynet: The executives at the helm of the very companies developing this supposedly terrifying technology—at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and elsewhere—are the ones sounding the alarm that their products could end the world, and efforts to regulate AI in the U.S. and the U.K. are already parroting those prophecies. But many advocates and academics say …

Generative AI is confusing Google

Generative AI is confusing Google

Published by skeptic

This technology won’t be contained. Illustration by The Atlantic November 9, 2023, 1:12 PM ET This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. (Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.) Earlier this week, I asked ChatGPT how to clean a humidifier. Then, frustrated by its answer, I asked it to design a less demanding humidifier. It did. But when I prompted the AI to estimate the cost of such a device—a few hundred dollars on the high end—I decided to live with the 30-minute white-vinegar soak it had suggested in the first place. The whole experience was quick, easy, and had the pleasant tickle of ingenuity: I felt like I’d participated in a creative process, rather than just looking something up. The problem, though, is that I never feel like I can trust a chatbot’s output. They are prone to making things up and garbling facts. Those flaws are bad enough in the context …