Meanwhile, in less visible ways, AI is already changing education, commerce, and the workplace. A friend recently told me about a large IT company he works with. The company had an extensive and long-established protocol for launching major initiatives that involved designing solutions, coding the product, and designing the launch. Going from concept to execution took months. But he recently saw a demo that applied cutting-edge AI to a typical software project. “All those things that took months happened in a few hours,” he says. “That made me agree with your column. Many of the companies around us are now animated corpses.” No wonder people are scared.
What fuels much of the anger against AI is distrust of the companies that build and promote it. By coincidence, this week he was scheduled to have breakfast with Ali Farhadi, the CEO of Allen Institute for AI, a nonprofit research effort. He is 100 percent convinced that the fuss is justified, but he also empathizes with those who don’t accept it, because, he says, companies that are trying to dominate the field are viewed with suspicion by the public. “AI has been treated like a black box that no one knows about, and it is so expensive that only four companies can make it,” says Farhadi. The fact that AI developers are moving so quickly further fuels distrust. “On the whole we don’t understand this, but we are implementing it,” he says. “I’m not against that, but we should expect these systems to behave unpredictably and people to react to that.” Fahadi, who is an advocate of open source AI, says that at least large companies should publicly disclose what materials they use to train their models.
Compounding the problem, many people involved in building AI also pledge their devotion to producing AGI. While many key researchers believe this will be a blessing to humanity (it is the founding principle of OpenAI), they have not exposed it to the public. “People are frustrated with the idea that this AGI thing is going to come tomorrow, a year or six months from now,” says Farhadi, who doesn’t like the concept. He says AGI is not a scientific term but a confusing notion that is ruining AI adoption. “In my lab, when a student uses those three letters, his graduation is delayed six months,” he says.
Personally, I’m agnostic on the AGI issue; I don’t think we’re about to, but I just don’t know what’s going to happen in the long run. When you talk to people who are on the front lines of AI, it turns out that they don’t know it either.
Some things seem clear to me, and I think over time they will become obvious to everyone, even those who throw spitballs at me in X. The AI will become more powerful. People will find ways to use it to make their work and personal lives easier. In addition, many people will lose their jobs and entire companies will be affected. It will be little consolation that new jobs and businesses could emerge from an AI boom, because some of the displaced people will still be stuck in unemployment lines or at Walmart checkouts. In the meantime, everyone in the AI world (including columnists like me) would do well to understand why people are so angry and respect their justifiable discontent.