Artificial intelligence has become the technological news of the last twelve months and promises to remain so for a long time. Until the arrival of ChatGPT a little over a year ago, this technology was largely unknown to the public, despite the fact that it is a term that was coined in 1956 and there are multiple ways in which we use it in our daily lives. Generative AIs have partly revolutionized writing and artificial images in video and photography, in programming code and in countless disciplines. They have opened a door to the future for us whose threshold we have barely looked out over, with a multitude of uncertain scenarios, some very good and others very negative. We have many questions and few answers.
Among the human beings who educate themselves the most to try to help others is Bill Gates. The founder of Microsoft has written a reflection on the intense period we have experienced in the last twelve months and points to the most optimistic current. “We now have a clearer idea – says Gates – of the types of tasks that AI will be able to perform on its own and those it will perform as a co-pilot. And it is clearer than ever how it can be used to improve access to education , mental health and much more. I am motivated to ensure that this technology helps reduce and does not contribute to the terrible inequalities we see around the world.” I hope he’s right, although not everyone is so optimistic.
This year we learned of the letter from the Future of Life Institute signed by hundreds of experts to ask for a pause in AI experiments. As expected, it was a dead letter despite the series of risks it pointed out for human existence. The creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) was pointed out as the cause of the sudden dismissal of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI and his return, just as surprising. This week, the ChatGPT company explained that it has a team dedicated to continually analyzing the capabilities and risks of AI and will issue reports to advise management and board members. The company ensures that this increases responsibility and rigor in the investigation of threats to security, weapons and persuasion. An OpenAI employee, Steven Heidel, quoted in X the announcement, but we don’t know if he was joking when he wrote: “Get ready, AGI is coming.”
Throughout this year, along with the euphoria over the advances of AI reflected in large companies such as OpenAI together with Microsoft, its largest investor; or Google, with its latest Gemini model; or also Meta, with LLaMA; We must add many more who participate in this sector. Chipmakers, such as Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Qualcomm, are focused on AI. The demand for servers to host artificial intelligence is high and the forecasts for electrical demand to train and operate these systems also skyrocket.
In its choice of word of the year, the website Dictionary.com has chosen “hallucinate”, a term that we have redefined this year because it is what we have learned that large AI language models do when, without apparent explanation, They begin to tell false or incoherent things very naturally. The website has incorporated that term into its dictionary with this definition: “(artificial intelligence) producing false information contrary to the user’s intention and presenting it as if it were true and factual.”
The year has been a whirlwind of news related to artificial intelligence and everything indicates that the trend is going to increase. A lot has happened, from the false arrest of Donald Trump created with Midjourney, to the agreement in the European Union to draft an artificial intelligence law. The first in the world, although they do not believe that it will be applied anymore. The bureaucratic procedure of the European Parliament leads us to the text being in force in a couple of years. Meanwhile, the field remains free. 2024 appears loaded.