Curious about AI? Subscribe to The Neuron. We keep you updated on AI in just 3-5 minutes, with a teensy bit of technical mumbo jumbo to tickle your brain. Plus, we have cats! The 3-Minute Guide to Slaying Your Dinner Convo About AI Heading to a date or a dinner party and don’t want to get left behind? Yeah, we know the feeling. Welcome to your cheat sheet on AI. These talking points will help you survive and thrive in most any conversation on AI (assuming you’re not in a room full of AI researchers, of course!) The 1-liner summary of what’s going on in AI AI models are getting smart very fast, so there’s a rush to figure out where they can be used, along with some big questions about what roles AI should or should not play in society. A model is basically one big math equation. In something like ChatGPT, you feed it a question/prompt, the model does a big calculation, and repeatedly calculates what it thinks the next word should be. Training a model means repeatedly giving the equation an input, scoring how good the output is, then adjusting the equation to make it better. “Using a model” uses the equation as-is to get the output, whereas “training a model” changes the equation entirely. The 1-paragraph summary of what’s going on in AI This is a very exciting time for AI. AI research companies and Big Tech have spent the last decade developing new AI models and training them with more data than ever before. This means models are getting very good at generating human-quality text, images and sound. AI is moving so fast that it’s causing people to rethink the role of technology in society and who makes money in the era of AI. We don’t know exactly the limits of what AI will be able to do and when, but it’s getting more likely that an AI will one day be as smart as a human. From https://theneurondaily.com The 3-Minute Guide to Slaying Your Dinner Convo About AI Fun tools that you can bring up ChatGPT - ask an AI chatbot anything Stable Diffusion / DALL-E / Midjourney - generate images Left: Stable Diffusion, Right: DALL-E Lensa - generate avatars Maket - architecture floor plans From https://theneurondaily.com The 3-Minute Guide to Slaying Your Dinner Convo About AI Tome - create slide decks Descript - all-in-one video/audio editing Descript can learn your voice and change what you say without you having to re-record! …plus endless tools like Jasper to help you write anything: blog posts, summaries, cover letters, resumes, emails, essays. The names you should know OpenAI - Company aiming to develop safe artificial intelligence. Produced leading models GPT and DALL-E, an AI that beat champions in DotA 2, and the AI that powers Github’s AI coding tool. From https://theneurondaily.com The 3-Minute Guide to Slaying Your Dinner Convo About AI DeepMind - Google subsidiary that became popular after it created an AI so good at the board game Go that it pushed the top player to retire. NVIDIA - US-based chipmaker that produces the computer hardware researchers use to train AI models. By far the leader in this space. In late 2022, ordered by the US government to stop exporting to China. Microsoft - Invested $1 billion in OpenAI and helps OpenAI train their models. Industry is curious how they will take advantage of this position given OpenAI’s successes. Google - Google Brain is a major research org. Produced multiple competing models to OpenAI’s GPT and DALL-E. Industry is curious how Google will react to AI’s fast-moving developments. Scale AI - $7.3 billion company (April 2021) accelerating AI by supplying data and tools to accelerate training. Won a $250 million DoD contract. GPT - Language model from OpenAI. Primary job in basic terms was to “predict the next word”, but it started getting really smart after they trained it on 8 billion web pages. Powers ChatGPT. DALL-E - Image model from OpenAI. Put in text, get out amazing images. Stable Diffusion - Image model from StabilityAI. Google modified it to produce DreamBooth, which is what powers the apps that can draw you in different style, like Lensa. What’s different about this wave of AI models? Previously, models were trained to do very specific things like recognizing handwritten numbers. That’s what things like spam filters or social media feeds used. Much of the recent innovation centers on foundational models (e.g., recognizing images in general, not just handwritten numbers), which are trained on a wide range of data. You can then fine-tune these models to tackle a more specific problem. Foundational models can be applied to many areas, so there’s lots of energy in experimenting with possible use cases. What’s the debate about AI art? The controversy comes in a few parts: 1. AI models need data to learn. Image models have learned on human artists’ work. How do we know who inspired a model’s output, and what do we owe them? 2. Does the ability to so easily create any art of any style ruin the spirit of art itself? You can imagine that an artist and a technologist would have very different answers about these! From https://theneurondaily.com The 3-Minute Guide to Slaying Your Dinner Convo About AI Is AI good or bad for society? This largely depends on what you’re using AI for. We don’t know the limits of AI just yet. People believe that automating low-level work is a good thing. But things like knowledge work, making decisions, telling humans what to do are controversial. That’s because we aren’t confident that we can always get AI to do what we want it to do. This is called AI alignment. Are we going to lose our jobs because of AI? When will that happen? It depends! We definitely need to reskill the workforce in light of AI, but exactly who and when are big questions. If there are huge shifts in the economy because of AI, we’ll also have to think about how we make sure people can continue to earn their livings. Is AI going to become sentient / develop consciousness / have emotions? What is consciousness anyways? How do you measure that? AI will eventually be able to pass any test that you design. For example, if the question is “How are you feeling?” and the AI responds with “Sad”, hasn’t it passed the test to some degree? But will it take over the world, like Skynet in Terminator? That will be up to us to decide what power we give it. From https://theneurondaily.com
