Skip to main content

AI revolution.

 

AI
There’s a colossal shift going on in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence — but it’s not the one some might think. While advanced lan­guage-gen­er­at­ing sys­tems and chat­bots have dom­in­ated news head­lines, private AI com­pan­ies have quietly entrenched their power. Recent devel­op­ments mean that a hand­ful of indi­vidu­als and cor­por­a­tions now con­trol much of the resources and know­ledge in the sec­tor — and will ulti­mately shape its impact on our col­lect­ive future.

The phe­nomenon, which AI experts refer to as «indus­trial cap­ture», was quan­ti­fied in a paper pub­lished by research­ers from the Mas­sachu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­no­logy in the journal Sci­ence this month, call­ing on poli­cy­makers to pay closer atten­tion. Its data is increas­ingly cru­cial. Gen­er­at­ive AI — the tech­no­logy under­ly­ing the likes of Chat­GPT — is being embed­ded into soft­ware used by bil­lions of people, such as Microsoft Office, Google Docs and Gmail. And busi­nesses from law firms to the media and edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions are being upen­ded by its intro­duc­tion.

The MIT researchers found that almost 70 per cent of AI PhDs went to work for com­pan­ies in 2020, com­pared with 21 per cent in 2004. In par­tic­u­lar, he said aca­dem­ics were unable to build large lan­guage mod­els like GPT-4, a type of AI soft­ware that gen­er­ates plaus­ible and detailed text by pre­dict­ing the next word in a sen­tence with high accur­acy. The tech­nique requires enorm­ous amounts of data and com­put­ing power that primar­ily only large tech­no­logy com­pan­ies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have access to. Ahmed found com­pan­ies’ share of the biggest AI mod­els had gone from 11 per cent in 2010 to 96 per cent in 2021.

A lack of access means research­ers can­not rep­lic­ate the mod­els built-in cor­por­ate labs and can, there­fore, neither probe nor audit them for poten­tial harms and biases very eas­ily.

The paper’s data also showed a big dis­par­ity between pub­lic and private invest­ment in AI tech­no­logy. In 2021, non-defence US gov­ern­ment agen­cies alloc­ated $1.5bn to AI. The European Com­mis­sion planned to spend €1bn. Mean­while, the private sec­tor inves­ted more than $340bn on AI in 2021.

In 2019, OpenAI pivoted from a non­profit into a profit­mak­ing enter­prise with a $1bn invest­ment from Microsoft, cit­ing a need «to increase our invest­ments in com­pute and tal­ent rap­idly».

The con­sequences of this shift are man­i­fold. First, it means pub­lic altern­at­ives to cor­por­ate AI tech, such as mod­els and data sets, are becom­ing increas­ingly scarce. And new applic­a­tions are likely to be com­mer­cially driven rather than in the broader pub­lic interest, sev­eral research­ers poin­ted out. Hanna, whose work is fun­ded by non-profits, agrees. «If you want to work on spe­cial­ised AI tasks like ensur­ing biod­iversity, or cli­mate sci­ence or agri­cul­ture, there is not a lot of appet­ite for that,» she said.

Meredith Whit­taker, pres­id­ent of encryp­ted app Sig­nal, has com­pared the situ­ation with the US mil­it­ary’s dom­in­ance over sci­entific research dur­ing the cold war in a sem­inal paper in 2021. «It is here, in these darker his­tor­ies, that we con­front the steep cost of cap­ture — whether mil­it­ary or indus­trial,» she wrote. «And its per­il­ous implic­a­tions for aca­demic free­dom . . . cap­able of hold­ing power to account».

Resoomed from original article of Mrs Madhumita Murgia Financial Times

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Cloud Bookkeeping

US FED rate rise.

  The US Federal Reserve officials have indicated that they plan to resume increasing interest rates to control inflation in the world's biggest economy. During the June meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee reached a consensus to keep interest rates stable for the time being to evaluate whether further tightening of policy would be necessary. However, the majority of the committee anticipates that additional rate increases will be required in the future. The minutes of the meeting have recently been made public. According to the minutes, most participants believed maintaining the federal funds rate at 5 to 5.25 per cent was appropriate or acceptable, despite some individuals wanting to raise the acceleration due to slow progress in cooling inflation. Although Fed forecasts predicted a mild recession starting later in the year, policymakers faced challenges in interpreting data that showed a tight job market and only slight improvements in inflation. Additionally, officials gr...
Post a Comment
Read more

EU business slide.

  S&P Global’s flash eurozone composite purchasing managers’ index, a key gauge of business conditions for the manufacturing and services sector, fell 1 point to 47.1, figures showed yesterday. That is its lowest level since November 2020 and the fourth consecutive month below the crucial 50 mark separating growth from contraction. One of the few bright spots in the survey was that companies in all sectors reported a slight easing of cost pressures, price growth and supply chain constraints. However, prices charged for goods and services still rose at the sixth fastest rate since such data started in 2002. Jobs growth increased marginally from October but remained low compared with the past 18 months. Following a few months of falling price pressure in manufacturing and services, the October print shows an overall stabilisation said Jens Eisenschmidt, chief European economist at Morgan Stanley. However, German businesses, at the hub of Europe’s energy crisis, reported that manu...
1 comment
Read more

Tariffs on UK electric cars.

  The European Commission has confirmed that it will continue with its plan to impose tariffs on electric cars exported between the UK and EU starting next year. This is due to the "rules of origin" requirement that mandates EVs traded across the English Channel to have 60% of their battery and 45% of their parts sourced from the EU or UK or face a 10% tariff. A senior Commission official, Richard Szostak, recently informed parliamentarians from the UK and EU that the bloc's battery investment has significantly declined, making the tariffs necessary to encourage domestic production. In 2022, the EU's share of global investment in battery production shrank from 41% to only 2% after the US offered substantial subsidies through its Inflation Reduction Act. Starting in 2024, car manufacturers in the UK will need to have 22% of their sales come from zero-emission vehicles, which means they may need to import EVs from the continent to meet this requirement. If EU carmakers ...
Post a Comment
Read more