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The AI information cycle didn’t decelerate a lot this vacation season. Between OpenAI’s 12 days of “shipmas” and DeepSeek’s main mannequin launch on Christmas Day, blink and also you’d miss some new growth.
And it’s not slowing down now. On Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned in a publish on his private weblog that he thinks OpenAI is aware of construct synthetic basic intelligence (AGI) and is starting to show its goal to superintelligence.
AGI is a nebulous time period, however OpenAI has its personal definition: “extremely autonomous methods that outperform people at most economically worthwhile work.” As for superintelligence, which Altman understands to be a step past AGI, he mentioned within the weblog publish that it might “massively speed up” innovation effectively past what people are able to reaching on their very own.
“[OpenAI continues] to imagine that iteratively placing nice instruments within the palms of individuals results in nice, broadly-distributed outcomes,” Altman wrote.
Altman — like OpenAI rival Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei — is of the optimistic perception that AGI and superintelligence will result in wealth and prosperity for all. But assuming AGI and superintelligence are even possible with out new technical breakthroughs, how can we be certain they’ll profit everybody?
A current regarding knowledge level is a examine flagged by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick on X early this month. Researchers from the National University of Singapore, University of Rochester, and Tsinghua University investigated the influence of OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, on freelancers throughout completely different labor markets.
The examine recognized an financial “AI inflection level” for various job sorts. Before the inflection level, AI boosted freelancer earnings. For instance, net builders noticed a ~65% enhance. But after the inflection level, AI started changing freelancers. Translators noticed an approximate 30% drop.
The examine suggests that after AI begins changing a job, it doesn’t reverse course. And that ought to concern all of us if extra succesful AI is certainly on the horizon.
Altman wrote in his publish that he’s “fairly assured” that “everybody” will see the significance of “maximizing broad profit and empowerment” within the age of AGI — and superintelligence. But what if he’s fallacious? What if AGI and superintelligence arrive, and solely firms have one thing to indicate for it?
The outcome gained’t be a greater world, however extra of the identical inequality. And if that’s AI’s legacy, it’ll be a deeply miserable one.
News
Silicon Valley stifles doom: Technologists have been ringing alarm bells for years concerning the potential for AI to trigger catastrophic harm. But in 2024, these warning calls have been drowned out.
OpenAI dropping cash: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned that the corporate is at present dropping cash on its $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan as a result of individuals are utilizing it greater than the corporate anticipated.
Record generative AI funding: Investments in generative AI, which encompasses a spread of AI-powered apps, instruments, and providers to generate textual content, photographs, movies, speech, music, and extra, reached new heights final yr.
Microsoft ups knowledge heart spending: Microsoft has earmarked $80 billion in fiscal 2025 to construct knowledge facilities designed to deal with AI workloads.
Grok 3 MIA: xAI’s next-gen AI mannequin, Grok 3, didn’t arrive on time, including to a development of flagship fashions that missed their promised launch home windows.
Research paper of the week
AI would possibly make numerous errors. But it will probably additionally supercharge consultants of their work.
At least, that’s the discovering of a crew of researchers hailing from the University of Chicago and MIT. In a brand new examine, they counsel that buyers who use OpenAI’s GPT-4o to summarize earnings calls understand increased returns than those that don’t.
The researchers recruited buyers and had GPT-4o give them AI summaries aligned with their investing experience. Sophisticated buyers received extra technical AI-generated notes, whereas novices received easier ones.
The extra skilled buyers noticed a 9.6% enchancment of their one-year returns after utilizing GPT-4o, whereas the much less skilled buyers noticed a 1.7% enhance. That’s not too shabby for AI-human collaboration, I’d say.
Model of the week
Prime Intellect, a startup constructing infrastructure for decentralized AI system coaching, has launched an AI mannequin that it claims may help detect pathogens.
The mannequin, referred to as METAGENE-1, was skilled on a dataset of over 1.5 trillion DNA and RNA base pairs sequenced from human wastewater samples. Created in partnership with the University of Southern California and SecureBio’s Nucleic Acid Observatory, METAGENE-1 can be utilized for varied metagenomic purposes, Prime Intellect mentioned, like learning organisms.
“METAGENE-1 achieves state-of-the-art efficiency throughout varied genomic benchmarks and new evaluations targeted on human-pathogen detection,” Prime Intellect wrote in a collection of posts on X. “After pretraining, this mannequin is designed to assist in duties within the areas of biosurveillance, pandemic monitoring, and pathogen detection.”
Grab bag
In response to authorized motion from main music publishers, Anthropic has agreed to take care of guardrails stopping its AI-powered chatbot, Claude, from sharing copyrighted music lyrics.
Labels, together with Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO, sued Anthropic in 2023, accusing the startup of copyright infringement for coaching its AI methods on lyrics from a minimum of 500 songs. The go well with hasn’t been resolved, however in the interim, Anthropic has agreed to cease Claude from offering lyrics to songs owned by the publishers and creating new music lyrics based mostly on the copyrighted materials.
“We proceed to sit up for displaying that, according to present copyright legislation, utilizing probably copyrighted materials within the coaching of generative AI fashions is a quintessential truthful use,” Anthropic mentioned in a press release.
