Tech & Society
Percy Liang: Transparency for Foundation Models
Only a year ago, ChatGPT woke the world up to the power of foundation models. But this power is not about shiny, jaw-dropping demos.
Tech & Society
Tech & Society
Sara Hooker: Prioritize Inclusion
The past year has seen incredible innovation in AI, and I expect as much or more in 2024. The coming year undoubtedly will be a year of rapid progress in models – multimodal, multilingual, and (hopefully) smaller and faster.
Tech & Society
Anastasis Germanidis: New Tools to Tell New Stories
The year 2023 was an inflection point in the development of broadly useful AI systems across text, image, video, audio, and other modalities. At Runway alone, we saw the release of video-generation models such as Gen-1 and Gen-2...
Tech & Society
Deep Learning Rocks: How 2023’s soundtrack became AI-generated
Fans of AI-driven music pressed play, while a major recording company reached for the stop button. AI grabbed listeners by the ears when it helped produce a new single by The Beatles, mimicked the voices of beloved stars, and generated music from text prompts.
Tech & Society
High Anx-AI-ety: A recap of 2023's battle between AI doomsday warnings and regulatory measures
Angst at the prospect of intelligent machines boiled over in moves to block or limit the technology. Fear of AI-related doomsday scenarios prompted proposals to delay research and soul searching by prominent researchers. Amid the doomsaying, lawmakers took dramatic regulatory steps.
Tech & Society
Can I Use This Data?: Conflict over information sources sparked legal and business turmoil in 2023.
Information may not want to be free after all. The age-old practice of training AI systems on data scraped from the web came into question as copyright owners sought to restrict AI developers from using their works without permission.
Tech & Society
Hollywood Squares Off: This year, AI helped reshape the film industry landscape.
The movie capital became a front line in the battle over workplace automation. U.S. film and television writers went on strike in May, and actors followed in July. They took up a variety of issues with their employers, but concern that AI would damage...
Tech & Society
Champion for Openness: Top companies launch the AI Alliance to ensure safe and open source AI.
A new consortium aims to support open source AI. Led by Meta and IBM, dozens of organizations from the software, hardware, nonprofit, public, and academic sectors formed the AI Alliance, which plans to develop tools and programs that aid open development.
Tech & Society
Europe Clamps Down: The AI Act, Europe's biggest AI law, moves closer to approval.
Europe’s sweeping AI law moved decisively toward approval. After years of debate, representatives of the European Union’s legislative and executive branches agreed on a draft of the AI Act, a comprehensive approach to regulating AI.
Tech & Society
Google’s Multimodal Challenger: All you need to know about Gemini, Google's new multimodal model
Google unveiled Gemini, its bid to catch up to, and perhaps surpass, OpenAI’s GPT-4. Google demonstrated the Gemini family of models that accept any combination of text (including code), images, video, and audio and output text and images. The demonstrations and metrics were impressive...
Letters
AI Doomsday Scenarios and How to Guard Against Them: AI could help an evildoer perpetrate a bioweapon attack. Here's what we can do about it.
Last week, I participated in the United States Senate’s Insight Forum on Artificial Intelligence to discuss “Risk, Alignment, & Guarding Against Doomsday Scenarios.”
Tech & Society
Limits on AI in Life Insurance: All about the first law that regulates use of AI in life insurance in the U.S.
The U.S. state of Colorado started regulating the insurance industry’s use of AI. Colorado implemented the first law that regulates the use of AI in life insurance and proposed extending the limits to auto insurers.