🤔 Is AI Utopian or Dystopian?

brAIn drain, The AIconomic revolution, tools, and 💸 ideas.

March 30, 2023

Contents:

  • ✉️ Letter to Pause Giant AI experiments creates chaos.

  • 🧰 AI Tools of the week

  • 🔧 AI is about to revolutionize the economy

  • 🩸 The brAIn drAIn has started

  • 💰 How to Make Money using AI

  • ⚙️ Are you looking for a role in an elite company?

✉️ Letter to Pause Giant AI experiments

Is it a strategy to catch up with those companies left behind or a genuine petition?

The Future of Life Institute whose mission is to steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life, has released an open letter calling on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This letter has been signed by over 1500 researchers, tech entrepreneurs, inventors, and many others.

The letter raises concerns about the risks associated with AI systems that possess human-level intelligence, citing the Asilomar AI Principles' emphasis on the transformative potential of advanced AI and the need for careful planning. Despite this, AI labs are racing to develop powerful AI systems that are hard to control.

The letter questions the ethical and societal impact of AI, such as AI-generated propaganda, job automation, and the potential for AI to outsmart humans. It asserts that these decisions should not be left to unelected tech leaders and calls for a pause in training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months.

The pause aims to allow AI labs and experts to develop safety protocols for AI development, ensuring safety and avoiding unpredictable AI models with emergent capabilities. It advocates for improving current AI systems' safety, interpretability, and robustness, and calls for collaboration to create AI governance systems, including regulatory authorities, oversight, and liability measures.

The call for a temporary halt has sparked a significant debate in the tech industry. Proponents of continued AI development, like Andrew NG, Co-Founder of Coursera, Stanford CS adjunct facultym and former head of Baidu AI Group/Google Brain, argue that these Utopian advancements have the potential to revolutionize various aspects of society, including education, healthcare, and work life, by providing applications that offer exponential improvements. Conversely, critics of unchecked AI development express deep concern about its potential to cause irreparable harm, potentially leading to the ultimate destruction of humanity. As a result, this contentious issue has generated diverging viewpoints on the responsible and ethical trajectory of AI innovation.

Skeptics of the call to pause AI development, supported by figures like Elon Musk, speculate that proponents may be motivated by concerns of falling behind in AI technology and are using the pause as a strategy to catch up with competitors. 

The global race for AI dominance, with countries like China actively pursuing AI leadership, makes achieving a universal agreement challenging. The situation is compared to nuclear arms control treaties, where public endorsement is not always matched by consistent adherence, raising concerns about the effectiveness and enforcement of a potential pause in AI development.

What do you think?

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🧰 AI Tools of the week - Email Assistants Edition

  • Ellie - Helps craft intelligent replies to emails in any language with context from the email thread.

  • Writesonic - SEO-optimized and plagiarism-free content for your blogs, ads, emails, and website with summary of the topic as prompts.

  • Copysmith - Text summary, and tone/language setting as prompt for content generation including blog titles, bodies, intros, emails, and more.

  • Flowrite - Email writing based on instruction and context based prompts about the output.

  • VoiceType - Chrome browser extension that helps you write emails quickly and easily using verbal descriptions provided by the user.

  • EmailMagic - Helps you write emails by analyzing your email data and matching your writing style.

  • Reply.io - Sales email tool that helps users create human-like emails with text prompts.

  • Respondable - Helps you write better, more effective emails in real time. It provides actionable advice on how to improve your emails, while giving you insight into your own writing style.

  • EmailIQ - Email rewriter with email drafts as prompts.

  • PolitePost - Rewriting your emails with rough emails as prompts.

🔧 AI is about to revolutionize the economy

We need to decide what that looks like.

MIT has released an interesting article on the AI gold rush as businesses seek to profit from generative models.

While ChatGPT offers automation capabilities in creative tasks, concerns arise about job displacement, economic inequality, and productivity. Society now faces the pivotal decision of using AI to empower workers and promote shared prosperity or risk exacerbating inequality through automation-driven job cuts.

🩸 The brAIn drAIn has started

Google is facing a strategic challenge in the AI arena, as it grapples with both defensive measures and talent retention. A growing number of prominent AI researchers are departing to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors or join rival firms where their contributions have greater influence.

Among the notable exits are Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer, key researchers behind Google's large language model LaMDA, who expressed frustration with Google's reluctance to launch a chatbot akin to ChatGPT, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The trend of defections is gaining momentum, signaling a potential shift in the competitive landscape of AI innovation.

💰 How to Make Money using AI

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Use the prompt 'Explain [complex topic] like I'm 5 years old,' and you will receive a straightforward and easy-to-follow response that demystifies the complexity of the topic. Use this capability to create children's books (or educational videos) that effectively break down and elucidate intricate subjects.

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