Weeks 2 and 3: What's Happening in AI

This week in AI news, we have updates on global policy, new ideas on responsible AI, + some interesting ideas about the impact of AI on issues from workforce gamblification to LLMs + public goods.

July 19, 2023

Policy: Latest stories – organized by region

Americas:

• Schumer’s AI game plan, by the numbers

• America's first law regulating AI bias in hiring takes effect

Europe:

• Founder and investor, Ian Hogarth, to lead UK’s Foundation Model Taskforce

• EU’s new AI regulation looks past ‘existential risks’ to focus on everyday life, says Italian PM

• International organizations:

• UN council to hold first meeting on potential threats of AI to global peace

• Hiroshima AI Process: The G7’s New Effort to Harmonize AI Rules

Responsible AI: Tangible examples and challenges

• Predicting extreme weather risk 3 weeks in advance – at 1/10th of the compute time. (More from NVIDIA and the Berlin Summit)

• Aligning superintelligent AI with human intent is the focus of OpenAI’s new team

• DeepMind wrote about an early warning system for novel AI risks

• Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

Bias:

• Training on only synthetic data breaks models, describes Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark

• Stable Diffusion’s text-to-image model amplifies race and gender stereotypes (in podcast here)

• AI-detectors biased against non-native English writers

Energy overhead:

• Huawei unveils 3 new designs for green data centers

• New approach trains LLMs in half the time

Where AI is going: Growth, breadth, and pace of technology

AI firsts:

• Human trials begin for AI-discovered and designed drug

• 1000x faster at designing a working computer

• VC and former head of Google China launches Lingyi Wanwu to build Chinese LLMs

• Defense start-ups, the Department of Defense, and AI service contracts

• New foundation models (ex. Anthropic’s Claude 2, Inflection-1, MosaicML’s MPT-30B) compete with ChatGPT 3-3.5 and LLaMa. (Visual: Rise of LLMs like ChatGPT)

Society: Big questions and broad perspectives as AI reshapes our world

• AI researchers worry the US and China will leave everyone else behind

• Latest Ernie Bot outperforms ChatGPT 4 in Chinese language, says Baidu; Korean LLM released by EleutherAI’s Polyglot Project

• AI reshapes how we think about life itself, believes Geoffrey Hinton. (More on this theme in God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn)

• AI in highly-regulated industries:

• 90% accuracy standard required by Europe’s largest rail system

• AI may someday work medical miracles. For now, it helps do paperwork

• Generative AI, enterprise software, and financial services

Feel free to respond to this email with your questions, thoughts, or recommendations for next week. What's happening in AI is shaped by our Charter themes and Responsible AI work.