🚀Impact of AI on BCG consultants: see the results; ChatGPT beat 17 doctors; AI from UAE does better than Meta's &more
Hi,
This is Thomas, Cofounder and CEO of digital agency KRDS (more about me at the end).
You're receiving Future Weekly, my personal selection of news about some of the most exciting (and sometimes scary) developments in technology 🤖 summarized as bullet points to help you save time and anticipate the future 🔮.
First, you'll find small bites about many different news, and then further down these summaries:
OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on how superintelligence could go wrong
Human ancestors nearly died out 900,000 years ago, study suggests
Meta released in July the second version of its unexpectedly popular model, Llama 2...
...et just got outdone by a tech institute in the UAE
Innovating et spreading innovation are two different things
Small Bites
New study with hundreds of BCG consultants make it clear : AI will reshape work (source)
Consultants using AI finished 12.2% more tasks on average, completed tasks 25.1% more quickly, and produced 40% higher quality results than those without.
AI works as a skill leveler. The consultants who scored the worst when we assessed them at the start of the experiment had the biggest jump in their performance, a 43% jump, when they got to use AI. The top consultants still got a boost, but less of one.
Funny and scary: "I've asked an AI to generate a trailer for a HEIDI movie and now I can never sleep again", see the 1-minute video
Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than human-driven ones, says new research (source)
High-Speed AI Drone Beats World-Champion Racers for the First Time (source)
Mars Helicopter Ingenuity filmed by the Perseverance rover.
ChatGPT found the right diagnosis for a boy who had seen 17 doctors. (source)
The specialists diagnosed the part of the body they knew about, unable to make a larger connection to his overall sickness but ChatGPT was.
Crazy: "This bird learned how to scroll YouTube and watch videos: also he keeps going back to bird videos when his owner changes the channel", see the 1-minute video
Someone asked AI to turn each country into a villain: see the generated images, for instance with France below
This AI lets you edit your voice, make it happier, angrier, sadder, translate it to French, Japanese and more: listen to the 1-min demo
Worms Revived After 46,000 Years Frozen in Siberian Permafrost, simply by putting them in water (NYT)
Millennia later, the worms, thawed out of the ice, would wriggle again, and demonstrate to scientists that life could be paused — almost indefinitely.
A study showed that "ChatGPT-4 generated more, cheaper & better ideas than folks in an innovation class." (source)
Laying out a factory floor in two dimensions to accommodate human workers will become a thing of the past. Factories designed by software will be denser, much more complex three-dimensional places, full of clusters of highly productive, highly automated machinery. (The Economist)
ENASA announced that it is partnering with the US Department of Defense to launch a nuclear-powered rocket engine into space as early as 2027 (source)
The technology could speed up a manned trip to Mars from the current 7-month minimum to as few as 45 days.
Starship changes everything:
Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for a billion dollars per unit.
After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin is reportedly back at Google headquarters and is working on the company's highly ambitious AI project called Gemini. (source)
OpenAI's Chief AI Architect Ilya Sutskever on what superintelligence will look like (source):
“The way I think about the AI of the future is not as someone as smart as you or as smart as me, but as an automated organization that does science and engineering and development and manufacturing,”
Suppose OpenAI braids a few strands of research together, and builds an AI with a rich conceptual model of the world, an awareness of its immediate surroundings, and an ability to act, not just with one robot body, but with hundreds or thousands: “We’re not talking about GPT-4. We’re talking about an autonomous corporation,” Sutskever said. Its constituent AIs would work and communicate at high speed, like bees in a hive. A single such AI organization would be as powerful as 50 Apples or Googles, he mused. “This is incredible, tremendous, unbelievably disruptive power.”
Wow: "6 Lego bricks can be combined 915 million ways"
OpenAI shared a guide for teachers using ChatGPT in their classroom—including suggested prompts, an explanation of how ChatGPT works and its limitations, the efficacy of AI detectors, and bias.
Meta is losing top talent left, right, and center over internal feuds about which AI projects are given computing resources. Of the 14 researchers who authored Meta’s LLaMA research paper, more than half have left the company. (source)
Why it’s hard for AI leaders to distance themselves that much further from the rest (The Economist)
The biggest cost is not training but experimentation. Plenty of ideas went nowhere before the one that worked got to the training stage. That is why Openai is estimated to have lost some $500m last year, even though GPT-4 cost $100m to train.
News of ideas that do not pay off tends to spread quickly throughout AI world. This helps Openai’s competitors avoid going down costly blind alleys.
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More to chew!
OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on how superintelligence could go wrong (source)
“First of all, I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5% or 50%, we should still take it seriously,” Altman said. “I don’t have an exact number, but I’m closer to the 0.5% than the 50%.”
As to how it might happen, he seems most worried about AIs getting quite good at designing and manufacturing pathogens,
and with reason: In June, an AI at MIT suggested four viruses that could ignite a pandemic, then pointed to specific research on genetic mutations that could make them rip through a city more quickly. Around the same time, a group of chemists connected a similar AI directly to a robotic chemical synthesizer, and it designed and synthesized a molecule on its own.
Altman worries that some misaligned future model will spin up a pathogen that spreads rapidly, incubates undetected for weeks, and kills half its victims. He worries that AI could one day hack into nuclear-weapons systems too. “There are a lot of things,” he said, and these are only the ones we can imagine.
Several years ago, Altman revealed a disturbingly specific evacuation plan he’d developed. He told The New Yorker that he had “guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks, and a big patch of land in Big Sur” he could fly to in case AI attacks.
“I wish I hadn’t said it,” he told me. He is a hobby-grade prepper, he says, a former Boy Scout who was “very into survival stuff, like many little boys are. I can go live in the woods for a long time,” but if the worst-possible AI future comes to pass, “no gas mask is helping anyone.”
Human ancestors nearly died out 900,000 years ago, study suggests (source)
about 900,000 years ago, global population dwindled to around 1,280 reproducing individuals
The population bottleneck coincided with dramatic changes in climate : Glacial periods became longer and more intense, leading to a drop in temperature and very dry climatic conditions.
the scientists suggested that the control of fire, as well as the climate shifting to be more hospitable for human life, could have contributed to a later rapid population increase around 813,000 years ago.
Meta released in July the second version of its unexpectedly popular model, Llama 2... (Wired)
This time, it is open source and free for commercial use from the start.
“I think there’s a case to be made that Llama 2 is the biggest event of the year in AI,” says an AI researcher at Hugging Face
The new version was made using 40 percent more data than the original, and a chatbot built with the model is capable of generating results on par with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta claims.
Just like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and other generative AI models released recently, Llama 2 likely cost millions to create. But only Meta’s system is available for free to developers, startups, and others interested in creating custom variations of the model. By supplying a cheaper option, Meta’s Llama 2 makes it easier for small companies or lone coders to create new products and services, potentially accelerating the current AI boom.
Microsoft, which has invested $10 billion in OpenAI, will nonetheless also offer Llama 2 downloads to developers for use in the cloud or on Windows.
Though Llama 2 lends credibility to Meta as a leader in open source AI, not all aspects of the release can be characterized as open. The training data used to create the model is described in release materials only as “publicly available online sources,” and the company won’t offer further details about what went into the model’s creation.
...et just got outdone by a tech institute in the UAE (The Economist)
Going by a selection of commonly used benchmarks compiled by Hugging Face, a library of models, their new model Falcon 180B bests the previous open-source champion, Meta’s LLAMA 2. A blog post by Hugging Face staff suggests the model is “on par” with Google’s palm 2.
Developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) which employs around 800 staff of 74 nationalities, working on subjects from biotechnology and robotics to quantum computing. Launched in 2020, it has been experimenting with Chatgpt-like “generative” AI for some time.
Innovating et spreading innovation are two different things (The Economist)
Japan is unusually innovative, producing on a per-person basis more patents a year than any country bar South Korea. Japanese researchers can take credit for the invention of the QR code, the lithium-ion battery and 3D printing.
But the country does a poor job of spreading new tech across its economy.
In 2017 a third of Japanese regional banks still used COBOL, a programming language invented a decade before man landed on the moon.
Tokyo is far more productive than the rest of the country. Cash still dominates.
In the late 2010s only 47% of large firms used computers to manage supply chains, compared with 95% in New Zealand.
According to our analysis, Japan is roughly 40% poorer than would be expected based on its innovation.
France is the opposite. Although its record on innovation is average, it is excellent at spreading knowledge.
In the 18th century French spies stole engineering secrets from Britain’s navy. In the early 20th century Louis Renault visited Henry Ford in America, learning the secrets of the car industry.
More recently, former AI experts at Google and Meta founded Mistral ai in Paris.
France also tends to do a good job of spreading new tech from the capital to its periphery. Today the productivity gap in France between a top and a middling firm is less than half as big as in Britain.
Previous newsletters:
How a missing gene in our DNA affected the Battle of Trafalgar and gave birth to the Mafia
See what that AI did after reading fMRI scans; why humanoid robots are coming of age
Superhuman: see how much work a professor did in 30 minutes with AI, + more gems about the future
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More about me
I cofounded KRDS right after college back in 2008 in Paris, we now also have offices in Singapore, HK, Shanghai, Dubai and India, we're one of the largest independent digital agencies in Asia. More here.
Watch our latest game showreel: At KRDS, we take pride in designing and developing games from scratch for brands and organizations, big and small! Gamification has always been part of our DNA, since our early days creating viral apps on Facebook back in Paris as the very first Facebook marketing partner outside of the USA!
I launched 2 sister agencies:
OhMyBot.net, dedicated to designing and building chatbots (watch the video case study for a chatbot campaign we ideated and developed for Clean & Clear: The Teen Skin Expert)
The WeChat Agency for the Chinese market (the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation is a client)
I also write op-eds and do podcasts at times. Here are my latest articles and podcasts
For the French speakers:
I’ve written more than 50 articles on the future of technology over the past years, all can be found listed here.
This newsletter has a French version with slightly different content: Parlons Futur
Have a great weekend :)
Thomas