AI: Regulators led by the EU determined to rein in 'danger to humanity' this year
The Office To The Potential Oppenheimer, Alarm Threat Sounded About Parallels Ai's Which Bomb Box The To Atomic Scientists Nuclear Humanity, Hit Drew Maker’s Warnings Over
ChatGPT was well on its way to becoming a household name even before 2023 kicked off.
Just weeks after the late November launch of the generative artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, OpenAI, the non-profit company behind ChatGPT, was projected to rake in as much as $1bn in revenue in 2024.
The so-called large language model's ability to turn prompts into poetry, songs, and high school essays enchanted 100 million users within two months, accomplishing what took Facebook four and a half years and Twitter five in becoming the fastest-growing consumer app ever.
Sometimes, the answers were wrong, despite being delivered with conviction. This happened often enough that “hallucinate”, in the sense of AI producing wrong information, was selected as Dictionary.com’s word of the year, owing to the technology’s deep impressions on society.
Such mistakes did not sap the euphoria or stop the existential dread this new technology inspired. Investors, led by Microsoft's multibillion-dollar bet on OpenAI, injected $27bn (€25bn) into generative AI startups in 2023, according to Pitchbook.
The battle for AI supremacy, stewing in the background between big tech firms for years, was suddenly in focus with Google-owner Alphabet, Facebook-owner Meta, and Amazon all announcing new milestones.
By March, thousands of scientists and AI experts signed an open letter demanding a pause to training more powerful systems to study their impact on, and potential danger to, humanity.
The move drew parallels to , Christopher Nolan’s box office hit about the titular atomic bomb maker’s warnings that the relentless pursuit of progress could lead to human extinction.
“This is an existential risk," said one of the "godfathers of AI", Geoffrey Hinton, who quit Alphabet in May. "It’s close enough that we ought to be working very hard right now, and putting a lot of resources into figuring out what we can do about it.”
PwC estimated AI-related economic impact could reach $15.7 trillion globally by 2030, nearly the GDP of China. Powering this growth optimism is the fact that nearly every industry from finance and legal to manufacturing and entertainment have embraced AI.
The winners and losers in the AI era are only just emerging. As in other eras, beneficiaries will likely be drawn along socio-economic and class lines.
Civil rights advocates have raised concerns over potential bias in AI in fields such as recruitment, while trade unions have warned of deep disruptions to employment as AI threatens to reduce or eliminate some jobs.
Chipmaker Nvidia, whose graphics processors are the hottest commodity in the global AI race, has emerged as a big early winner, with its market capitalisation soaring into the trillion dollar club alongside Apple and Alphabet.
In the final months of the year, another winner appeared unexpectedly out of turmoil. In November, the board of OpenAI fired chief executive Sam Altman but the ousted CEO was restored just days later.
In explaining what brought the company to the brink, Altman said people were fretting over the high stakes of developing AI that could surpass human intelligence. "I think that all exploded,” he said at a New York event in December.
Some OpenAI researchers had warned of a new AI breakthrough through a top-secret model called Q* (pronounced Q-Star), Reuters reported in November.
One question provoked by the OpenAI saga: Will the future of AI and its societal impact continue to be deliberated behind closed doors, by a privileged few in Silicon Valley?
Regulators led by the EU are determined to play a lead role in 2024 with a comprehensive plan to establish guardrails for the technology in the form of the EU AI Act. The details of the draft are due to be disclosed in the coming weeks.
These rules, and others being drafted in the US, come as the world heads into the biggest election year in history, raising concern about AI-generated misinformation targeting voters.