The AI Arms Race Is On. Start Worrying
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To create is human. For the past 300,000 years weve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing before.Now we have company. While youre reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. Theyre writing pitch decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blueprints, and providing health advice.Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive impact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on social media. But generative AI, a category of system that can be prompted to create wholly novel content, is much newer. TIME photo illustrationBuy a print of the AI cover hereThis shift marks the most important technological breakthrough since social media. Generative AI tools have been adopted ravenously in recent months by a curious, astounded public, thanks to programs like ChatGPT, which responds coherently (but not always accurately) to virtually any query, and Dall-E, which allows you to conjure any image you dream up. In January, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users, a faster rate of adoption than Instagram or TikTok. Hundreds of similarly astonishing generative AIs are clamoring for adoption, from Midjourney to Stable Diffusion to GitHubs Copilot, which allows you to turn simple instructions into computer code.AdvertisementRead More: The Creator of ChatGPT Thinks AI Should Be RegulatedProponents believe this is just the beginning: that generative AI will reorient the way we work and engage with the world, unlock creativity and scientific discoveries, and allow humanity to achieve previously unimaginable feats. Forecasters at PwC predict that AI could boost the global economy by over 15 trillion by 2030.This frenzy appeared to catch off guard even the tech companies that have invested billions of dollars in AIand has spurred an intense arms race in Silicon Valley. In a matter of weeks, Microsoft and Alphabet-owned Google have shifted their entire corporate strategies in order to seize control of what they believe will become a new infrastructure layer of the economy. Microsoft is investing 10 billion in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT and Dall-E, and announced plans to integrate generative AI into its Office software and search engine, Bing. Google declared a code red corporate emergency in response to the success of ChatGPT and rushed its own search-oriented chatbot, Bard, to market. A race starts today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Feb. 7, throwing down the gauntlet at Googles door. Were going to move, and move fast.AdvertisementWall Street has responded with similar fervor, with analysts upgrading the stocks of companies that mention AI in their plans and punishing those with shaky AI-product rollouts. While the technology is real, a financial bubble is expanding around it rapidly, with investors betting big that generative AI could be as market shaking as Microsoft Windows 95 or the first iPhone.More from TIMERead More: Fun AI Apps Are Everywhere Right Now. But a Safety Reckoning Is ComingBut this frantic gold rush could also prove catastrophic. As companies hurry to improve the tech and profit from the boom, research about keeping these tools safe is taking a back seat. In a winner-takes-all battle for power, Big Tech and their venture-capitalist backers risk repeating past mistakes, including social medias cardinal sin: prioritizing growth over safety. While there are many potentially utopian aspects of these new technologies, even tools designed for good can have unforeseen and devastating consequences. This is the story of how the gold rush beganand what history tells us about what could happen next.AdvertisementA timeline of early AI advances this decade Lon TweetenTIMEIn fact, generative AI knows the problems of social media all too well. AI-research labs have kept versions of these tools behind closed doors for several years, while they studied their potential dangers, from misinformation and hate speech to the unwitting creation of snowballing geopolitical crises.That conservatism stemmed in part from the unpredictability of the neural network, the computing paradigm that modern AI is based on, which is inspired by the human brain. Instead of the traditional approach to computer programming, which relies on precise sets of instructions yielding predictable results, neural networks effectively teach themselves to spot patterns in data. The more data and computing power these networks are fed, the more capable they tend to become.AdvertisementIn the early 2010s, Silicon Valley woke up to the idea that neural networks were a far more promising route to powerful AI than old-school programming. But the early AIs were painfully susceptible to parroting the biases in their training data: spitting out misinformation and hate speech. When Microsoft unveiled its chatbot Tay in 2016, it took less than 24 hours for it to tweet Hitler was right I hate the jews and that feminists should all die and burn in hell. OpenAIs 2020 predecessor to ChatGPT exhibited similar levels of racism and misogyny.Read More: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than 2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less ToxicThe AI boom really began to take off around 2020, turbocharged by several crucial breakthroughs in neural-network design, the growing availability of data, and the willingness of tech companies to pay for gargantuan levels of computing power. But the weak spots remained, and the history of embarrassing AI stumbles made many companies, including Google, Meta, and OpenAI, mostly reluctant to publicly release their cutting-edge models. In April 2022, OpenAI announced Dall-E 2, a text-to-image AI model that could generate photorealistic imagery. But it initially restricted the release to a waitlist of trusted users, whose usage would, OpenAI said, help it to understand and address the biases that DALLE has inherited from its training data.AdvertisementEven though OpenAI had onboarded 1 million users to Dall-E by July, many researchers in the wider AI community had grown frustrated by OpenAI and other AI companies look-but-dont-touch approach. In August 2022, a scrappy London-based startup named Stability AI went rogue and released a text-to-image tool, Stable Diffusion, to the masses. Releasing AI tools publicly would, according to a growing school of thought, allow developers to collect valuable data from usersand give society more time to prepare for the drastic changes advanced AI would bring.Stable Diffusion quickly became the talk of the internet. Millions of users were enchanted by its ability to create art seemingly from scratch, and the tools outputs consistently achieved virality as users experimented with different prompts and concepts. You had this generative Pandoras box that opened, says Nathan Benaich, an investor and co-author of the 2022 State of AI Report. It shocked OpenAI and Google, because now the world was able to use tools that they had gated. It put everything on overdrive.AdvertisementOpenAI quickly followed suit by throwing open the doors to Dall-E 2. Then, in November, it released ChatGPT to the public, reportedly in order to beat out looming competition. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized in interviews that the more people used AI programs, the faster they would improve.Users immediately flocked to both OpenAI and its competitors. AI-generated images flooded social media and one even won an art competition; visual effects artists for movies began using AI-assisted software for Hollywood hits like Everything Everywhere All at Once. Architects are devising AI blueprints; coders are writing AI-based scripts; publications are releasing AI quizzes and articles. Venture capitalists took notice, and have thrown over a billion dollars at AI companies that might unlock the next great productivity boost. Chinese tech giants Baidu and Alibaba announced chatbots of their own, boosting their share prices.AdvertisementA timeline of recent generative AI releases Lon TweetenTIMEMicrosoft, Google, and Meta, meanwhile, are taking the frenzy to extreme levels. While each has stressed the importance of AI for years, they all appeared surprised by the dizzying surge in attention and usageand now seem to be prioritizing speed over safety. In February, Google announced plans to release its ChatGPT rival Bard, and according to the New York Times said in a presentation that it will recalibrate the level of risk it is willing to take when releasing tools based on AI technology. And in Metas recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared his aim for the company to become a leader in generative AI.AdvertisementRead More: AI Helped Write This Play. It May Contain RacismIn this rush, mistakes and harms from the tech have risenand so has the backlash. When Google demonstrated Bard, one of its responses contained a factual error about the Webb Space Telescopeand Alphabets stock cratered immediately after. Microsofts Bing is also prone to returning false results. Deepfakesrealistic yet false images or videos created with AIare being used to harass people or spread misinformation: one widely shared video showed a shockingly convincing version of Joe Biden condemning transgender people.Companies including Stability AI are facing lawsuits from artists and rights holders who object to their work being used to train AI models without permission. And a TIME investigation found that OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan workers who were paid less than 2 an hour to review toxic content, including sexual abuse, hate speech and violence.AdvertisementAs worrying as these current issues are, they pale in comparison with what could emerge next if this race continues to accelerate. Many of the choices being made by Big Tech companies today mirror those they made in previous eras, which had devastating ripple effects.Social mediathe Valleys last truly world-changing innovationcarries the first valuable lesson. It was built on the promise that connecting people would make our societies healthier and individuals happier. More than a decade later, we can see that its failures came not from that welcome connectedness, but the way tech companies monetized it: by slowly warping our news feeds to optimize for engagement, keeping us scrolling through viral content interspersed with targeted online advertising. True social connection has become increasingly sparse on our feeds. At the same time, our societies have been left to deal with the second-order implications: a gutted news business, a rise in misinformation, and a skyrocketing teen mental-health crisis.AdvertisementIts not hard to see AIs integration into Big Tech products going down the same road. Alphabet and Microsoft are most interested in how AI will make their search engines more valuable, and have shown demos of Google and Bing in which the first results users see are AI-created. But Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI-development platform Hugging Face, argues that search engines are the absolute worst way to use generative AI, because it gets things wrong so often. Mitchell says the actual strengths of AIs like ChatGPTassisting with creativity, ideation, and menial tasksare being sidelined in favor of shoehorning the technology into moneymaking machines for tech giants.Read More: AI Chatbots Are Getting Better. But an Interview With ChatGPT Reveals Their LimitsIf search engines successfully integrate AI, that subtle shift could decimate the many businesses that rely on search, either for ad traffic or business referrals. Nadella, Microsofts CEO, has said the new AI-oriented Bing search engine will drive more traffic, and therefore revenue, to publishers and advertisers. But like the brewing pushback against AI-generated art, many in the media now fear a future where tech giants chatbots cannibalize content from news sites, providing nothing in return.AdvertisementThe question of how AI companies will monetize their projects also looms large. For now, most are free to use, because their creators are following the Silicon Valley playbook of charging little or nothing for products to crowd out competition, subsidized by huge investments from venture-capital firms. While unsuccessful companies adopting this strategy slowly bleed money, the winners often end up with vicelike grips on markets they can control as they see fit. Right now, ChatGPT is ad-less and free to use. Its also burning a hole in OpenAIs pocketbook: each individual chat costs the company single-digit cents, according to its CEO. The companys ability to weather huge losses right now, thanks partly to Microsofts largesse, gives it a huge competitive advantage.In February, OpenAI brought in a 20 monthly charge for a subscription tier of the chatbot. Google already prioritizes paid ads in search results. Its not much of a leap to imagine it doing the same with AI-generated results. If humans come to rely on AIs for information, it will be increasingly difficult to tell what is factual, what is an ad, and what is completely made up.AdvertisementAs profit takes precedence over safety, some technologists and philosophers warn of existential risk. The explicit goal of many of these AI companiesincluding OpenAIis to create an Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, that can think and learn more efficiently than humans. If future AIs gain the ability to rapidly improve themselves without human guidance or intervention, they could potentially wipe out humanity. An oft-cited thought experiment is that of an AI that, following a command to maximize the number of paperclips it can produce, makes itself into a world-dominating superintelligence that harvests all the carbon at its disposal, including from all life on earth. In a 2022 survey of AI researchers, nearly half of the respondents said that there was a 10 or greater chance that AI could lead to such a catastrophe.Inside the most cutting-edge AI labs, a few technicians are working to ensure that AIs, if they eventually surpass human intelligence, are aligned with human values. They are designing benevolent gods, not spiteful ones. But only around 80 to 120 researchers in the world are working full-time on AI alignment, according to an estimate shared with TIME by Conjecture, an AI-safety organization. Meanwhile, thousands of engineers are working on expanding capabilities as the AI arms race heats up.AdvertisementWhen it comes to very powerful technologiesand obviously AI is going to be one of the most powerful everwe need to be careful, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google-owned AI lab DeepMind, told TIME late last year. Not everybody is thinking about those things. Its like experimentalists, many of whom dont realize theyre holding dangerous material.Even if computer scientists succeed in making sure the AIs dont wipe us out,
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