Each week we will share the latest artificial intelligence news and insights, curated for professionals, board members, and entrepreneurs, as we learn to navigate together the opportunities and threats arising from the evolution of AI and technology.
This week in AI
Welcome to AI Forum’s weekly report where we share AI news and insights, curated for students, practitioners, executives and entrepreneurs.
During 2023 we will be rolling out a number of AI enhancements, integrated by our sister organisation, Watermark News. To learn more about Content Augmentation Technology, follow the link in the comments section.
In this week’s report, we discuss the real world capabilities of Generative AI technology, and breaking AI funding news.
Generative AI Technology
As the phenomenal interest in OpenAI’s ChatGPT continues to reverberate globally, reality is starting to kick in, with the limitations of current offerings becoming clearer.
Aside from plagiarism and the growing list of legal issues (including intellectual property and copyright infringements), the dangers in relying on technology with insufficient end-user safeguards are being surfaced by industry experts.
Ignoring the well documented issues that ChatGPT and other Transformer based substitutes (for example Google’s Bard) have with bias, racism and sexism, consider the severe limitation of many models with learning data ending in late 2021 – due to the time it takes to teach a Large Language Model.
Furthermore, many early releases are only available through an internet browser. A number of scams have already emerged through various app stores, illustrating how early we are in this cycle of innovation and adoption.
Despite numerous limitations, AI chat technologies are convincing, echoing the (incorrect) 2022 claims by ex-Google Engineer, Blake Lemoine, that Lamda is sentient.
The apparent authenticity of tools such as ChatGPT, Lamda and Bard can lull non-expert end users into a false sense of security and over reliance.
Renown scientist, best-selling author and entrepreneur, Gary Marcus, talks about this risk of relying on immature, but otherwise convincing technology on his excellent substack resource:
“And it’s not just that AI has a fairly spotty track record for taking demos into reliable products; and it’s not just that hallucinatory web search could be dangerous if left to run amok in domains like medicine, it’s that the promises themselves are problematic, when examined from a scientific perspective.
Scaling neural network models—making them bigger—has made their faux writing more and more authoritative-sounding, but not more and more truthful.”
We will cover the safeguards needed to protect the public in future reports, as this powerful technology permeates society through 2023 and beyond.
AI Funding News
In this week’s funding news, the market continues to witness strong investor appetite for deals, even after the volatility from Google’s recent Bard demo wiped out one hundred billion dollars in market value – illustrating that even technology from the big firms is work in progress.
Magic Dev develops AI powered software that publishes new software.Their Twenty Three million US dollar Series A round was led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, with participation from prominent investors Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, and Amplify Partners. From their Press Release:
“I’ve been evaluating enterprise applications for AI for the past three years,” said CapitalG partner Jill Chase who led the investment and will be joining Magic’s board. “Code generation is an obvious application for AI, given the magnitude of the software development market and the clear ROI associated with productivity gains.”
MindsDB, based in Berkeley, California, USA develops predictive machine learning for users to accurately interrogate their data. The firm raised sixteen point five million USD in Series A financing, led by Benchmark.
From their Press Release,
“Today, there’s tremendous interest in the developer community to implement and integrate machine learning into their applications, but the process is complicated and expensive,” said Chetan Puttagunta, general partner at Benchmark. “MindsDB is enabling developers from small startups to the biggest enterprises in the world by enabling developers to quickly and efficiently run ML models of their choosing with the database of their choosing. This approach has already made MindsDB the de facto choice for developers”
That’s all for this week. If you want to publish your news and Press Releases, email our news desk by Close of Business Thursday each week on newsdesk@ai-forum.com and to stay informed, visit our website ai-forum.com and click to subscribe.
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