Friends, when dogs talk, we are talking about biblical alteration. Do you think future models will work? worse in law exams?
If nothing else, this week proves that the pace of AI progress isn’t slowing down at all. Ask the people who build these models. “A lot has happened: the Internet, mobile devices,” says Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and now Google’s AI czar, in a post-keynote talk at I/O. “AI is going perhaps three or four times faster than those other revolutions. “We are in a period of 25 or 30 years of massive changes.” When I asked Google’s vice president of search, Liz Reid, to name a big challenge, she didn’t say it was maintaining innovation; instead, she cited the difficulty of absorbing the pace of change. “As the technology is early, the biggest challenge is even what is possible,” she says. “It’s about understanding what the models are great at today and what they’re not great at but will be great in three or six months. Technology is changing so quickly that you can get two researchers in the room who are working on the same project and they will have totally different points of view when something is possible.”
There is universal agreement in the tech world that AI is the biggest thing since the Internet, and maybe even bigger. And when non-techies see the products for themselves, more often than not they become believers too. (Including Joe Biden, after a ChatGPT demo in March 2023.) It’s why Microsoft is far along in a total reinvention of AI, why Mark Zuckerberg is now refocusing Meta to create artificial general intelligence, why Amazon and Apple are desperately trying to keep up. and why countless startups are focusing on AI. And as all these companies are trying to gain an advantage, competitive fervor is increasing innovations at a frenetic pace. Do you think it was a coincidence That OpenAI made its announcement a day before Google I/O?
Skeptics might try to claim that this is an industry-wide illusion, fueled by the prospect of massive profits. But the demos don’t lie. We’ll eventually get used to the AI wonders revealed this week. The smartphone once seemed exotic; It is now an appendage no less critical to our daily lives than an arm or a leg. At a certain point, AI feats may also stop seeming magical. But the AI revolution will change our lives and change us, for better or worse. And we haven’t even seen GPT-5 yet.
Time travel
Sure, I could be wrong about AI. But consider the last time I made a call like that. In 1995, I joined Newsweek (the same organ where Clifford Stoll had just dismissed the Internet as a hoax) and at the end of the year I argued about this new digital medium: “This changes everything.” Some of my colleagues thought I had bought into a hype. Actually, reality surpassed my hyperbole.
In 1995, the Internet ruled. Are you talking about a revolution? For once, the shoe fits. “In the long term, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the Internet,” says Paul Moritz, vice president of Microsoft. “It’s really about opening communications to the masses.” And 1995 was the year the masses began to arrive. “If you look at the numbers they cite, with the Web doubling every 53 days, that’s biological growth, like a red tide or a population of lemmings,” says Kevin Kelly, executive editor of WIRED. “I don’t know if we’ve ever seen technology exhibit that kind of growth.” In fact, there is a lot of controversy over exactly how many people use the Internet regularly. A recent Nielsen survey put the number at an impressive 24 million Americans. Throughout the year, discussion about the Internet ranged from sex to stock prices to software standards. But the most significant aspect of the Internet has nothing to do with money or technology, really. We are.
