Of the many challenges that humanity has pending in this year that has just begun, that of artificial intelligence is one of those that harbors the greatest unknowns. In the little over a year since OpenAI revealed ChatGPT to the world, progress has been accelerated. AI is going to be present in many of the things that happen with great impacts in many areas, but the scope of those effects is still unpredictable.
The emergence of large language models that power generative AI bots is a recent technology about which even the experts who create it still have many things to discover. No one has been able to find out, for example, why the machine makes a certain decision when choosing an option or why, after a series of coherent reasoning, the algorithm deviates in an answer or offers a false one, which is called “hallucination.” .
One of the challenges that has arisen the most in the last twelve months and will continue to be very present on a daily basis is that of regulation. Governance worries political leaders in all countries. Against the clock, Europe has forced an agreement to draft a pioneering AI law in the world, although its entry into force will take around two years. This period is an eternity with a technology in which jumps occur practically every week.
While waiting for legislators from the two major parties in the United States to agree, President Joe Biden signed an emergency decree at the end of last October to force AI companies to communicate critical information to the federal government. security of your systems. The presidential initiative was accelerated after seeing the risks of AI in the latest Mission: Impossible movie. The decree also seeks to protect the use of AI to design dangerous biological material and misleading content.
The vast majority of what happens with AI will happen within the laboratories of companies, so the fight against biases – of race and sex, for example –, errors and the use of tools of this technology for massive cyber attacks will depend of the responsibility of the companies themselves. What they call “self-regulation” that had such disastrous consequences in other sectors.
This year, AI will also have to face the challenge of sustainability. The use of enormous supercomputing power connected to millions of online users can involve enormous energy expenditure. For this reason, one of the approaches for 2024 will be the use of smaller AI models for daily use within mobile devices and computers, so that they do not connect with the outside at the request of their user. This model of small AI will also imply a new batch of devices with chips capable of easily managing these functionalities.
The progressive implementation of AI tools that will automate many jobs carried out until now by humans, also represents a huge economic and social challenge, because it can lead to massive layoffs, with information suggesting that prosperous technology companies like Google could leave up to 30,000 employees on the street. to restructure your organization with artificial intelligence. Hold on, curves are coming.