Angelo Lo Certo muses on some recent developments in AI.
Whether you like it or not, unless you’re living in a remote hut in the jungle or are shipwrecked on a deserted tropical island, chances are that your life increasingly involves and benefits from interactions with AI. And while it’s true, artificial intelligence will replace some jobs, it will also be a boon to others. Through its ability to produce language and software code, generative AI and ML are already significantly accelerating innovations in everything from agriculture to education, manufacturing to medicine, rocket science to more earthly forms of transportation, and so much more.
Nobel prizes for AI
As a case in point, AI’s potential to shape the future was recognised at the highest level, with Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry at this year’s awards. As The Economist puts it, “the scientific Nobel prizes have always, in their way, honoured human intelligence. This year, for the first time, the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) has been recognised as well.”
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 was awarded to co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs Demis Hassabis, and Google DeepMind Director Dr John Jumper. The pair share the prize for their work developing AlphaFold, a pioneering AI system that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. This discovery opens the door to medical breakthroughs in drugs, treatments, and other therapies.
Meanwhile, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 was awarded jointly to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, who’s known as the Godfather of AI. Despite not collaborating directly, they built on each other’s work, developing “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”.
AI embedded in devices
Away from the rarefied air of Nobel Prizes, leading tech companies like Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and Google are embedding features such as enhanced photos, text-to-speech tools, and personalised recommendations in their devices, placing AI in reach of everyone’s fingertips. For example, Apple’s AI Intelligence works across devices, with its natural language search giving users the ability to search for just about anything by simply describing what they are looking for. Meanwhile, Samsung introduced Galaxy AI, which lets people translate conversations on the fly and edit photos with simple taps. With consumers getting used to doing stuff with AI on their devices, companies are following suit, incorporating more AI tools into everyday work tasks.
Emergence of the CAIO
Not surprisingly, in large organisations, room is being made in the C-suite for Chief AI Officers. Currently an embryonic role, likely responsibilities for the nascent CAIO will revolve around developing AI strategy and driving AI literacy across the company. It’s likely the role will encompass managing AI governance and privacy, mitigating risks in AI deployments, overseeing training and education on AI, and ensuring transparency in AI use. It will be crucial for the CAIO to get key stakeholders from HR, finance, sales, and IT onboard as to how AI will impact their lines of business.
Experimenting with AI in marketing
Exploring how we can use AI in our marketing arena, one of our creatives was recently playing around with an AI tool that lets you create super slick podcasts from written material. By simply cutting and pasting one of our articles into the tool, in a matter of minutes, out came a realistic conversation between two AI-generated voices. The podcast brought the written words to life in an engaging discussion that was complete with natural speech rhythms and subtle voice inflections. Zero time was spent in the studio for the recording. Zero time spent in the editing suite.
However, while the result was highly engaging to our internal team, it was far from something we would want to use externally. Curiously, the tool’s liberal overuse of “like” to accentuate pauses, that I gather was meant to make the dialogue sound more natural and more human, had the opposite effect. So, for now, we’ll keep watching this space and await the next iterations of this tool.
Could AI spin out of control?
While AI has won scientific recognition with the Nobel Prizes, the risks that come with AI have also been put under the spotlight. In what was surely a Frankenstein’s monster moment, the Godfather of AI, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton used his speech at the Nobel Prize banquet on 10 December to urge everyone to understand that the rapid progress in AI comes with untold risks. He concluded this speech with an alarming prophecy:
There is also a longer-term existential threat that will arise when we create digital beings that are more intelligent than ourselves. We have no idea whether we can stay in control. But we now have evidence that if they are created by companies motivated by short-term profits, our safety will not be the top priority. We urgently need research on how to prevent these new beings from wanting to take control. They are no longer science fiction.”
Governments and regulators around the world are now tasked with figuring out how to address this challenge with the right regulatory frameworks that ensure safety, transparency, and reliability while facilitating new levels of innovation. With the right rail guards in place, we can look forward to AI lightening our workloads, maximising efficiency, and minimising errors to support human endeavour and being our very best selves.
Disclaimer: No AI tool was used to write this content.
