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- 🤖 The dangers of A.I. and the future of work
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
Here's what we have for you today:
OpenAI CEO on the dangers of AI
Building the ultimate AI teammate
The dangers of AI
While the capabilities of ChatGPT-4 are certainly impressive, from achieving a human level of performance on tests to allowing you to instantaneously code games and websites, there are potential dangers lurking when mass-distributing a powerful new technology like this.
“We’ve got to be careful here,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
“I’m particularly worried that these models could be used for large-scale disinformation. Now that they’re getting better at writing computer code, they could be used for offensive cyber-attacks.”
And while OpenAI has worked to introduce safeguards into their products since first releasing the initial version of ChatGPT back in November, a number of other companies are rushing to market with ChatGPT competitors that may not be as cautious.
“There will be other people who don’t put some of the safety limits that we put on,” he added. “Society, I think, has a limited amount of time to figure out how to react to that, how to regulate that, how to handle it.”
Elon Musk has been calling for AI regulation for over a decade, stating that the technology has the capacity to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons and recommending the slowing of AI development in order to minimize the danger to our civilization.
Yet as the costs of creating and accessing powerful AI models continue to drop, and with our representatives in Washington remaining technically challenged, the chances of keeping this technology out of the hands of bad actors are slim, making it look like we’re going to be in for a bumpy ride.
The Ultimate AI Teammate
The progress that AI has made since ChatGPT’s debut 5 months ago is astounding, but a new company named Adept is looking to go a step beyond chatbots in order to revolutionize the way that we interact with AI.
Founded by David Luan, the former VP of engineering at OpenAI and the former head of large model efforts at Google, the company is looking to create general intelligence that “takes your goals, in plain language, and turns them into actions on the software you use every day.”
“We think that AI’s ability to read and write text will continue to be valuable,” but an AI that’s able to perform functions on your behalf “will be significantly more valuable for enterprise,” Luan said.
“Models trained on text can write great prose, but they can’t take actions in the digital world. You can’t ask them to book you a flight, cut a check to a vendor or conduct a scientific experiment. True general intelligence requires models that can not only read and write, but act when people ask it to do something.”
In order to accomplish this, Adept has intensely studied how humans interact with computers, using the data to train a neural network capable of operating every software application, website, and API in existence.
With the new technology, an engineer looking to design a new airplane wing would simply ask the AI assistant to perform the task, with the AI automatically selecting the correct software program for the task, researching the necessary parameters for construction, and executing the task step-by-step until completion.
Adept believes that this type of technology will power the future of work, with knowledge workers pairing up with AI teammates in order to execute tasks in a hyper-efficient manner.
“While general intelligence is often described in the context of human replacement, that’s not our north star. We believe that AI systems should be built with people at the center,” Luan said.
“Our vision is one where people remain in the driver’s seat: discovering new solutions, enabling more informed decisions, and giving us more time for the work that we actually want to do.”
You can learn more about Adept on their website here.
And now your moment of zen
That’s all for today folks!
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