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From Siri to Photoshop to Google Search — Large AI Models Will Redefine How We Live
GPT-3 and DALL·E-like AI models will power services and products you use every day. But, are we ready?
The following is an extract from The Algorithmic Bridge, an educational newsletter about the AI that matters to your life. Its purpose is to help you understand the impact AI has in our world and develop the tools to better navigate the future.
When we think about consumer technologies that have redefined how we live and interact with one another in the 21st century, two come to mind immediately: Smartphones and social media. We’re about to witness the emergence of the third.
Apple’s announcement of the iPhone in 2007 marked a “before and after” for the internet, advertising, software distribution, and phones themselves (remember the BlackBerry?). The iPhone slowly but surely reshaped our day-to-day relationship with the digital world. We can no longer fathom a world without a smartphone in our pockets. And the same happened with social media. From Facebook to TikTok, these algorithm-driven feeds of posts and news govern our virtual relationships — which these days take up even more time and space than our physical ones. The world has changed so much in the last twenty years that it’d be largely unrecognizable for anyone who lived in the 20th century.
During that same period, artificial intelligence (AI) reached a new stage of interest, funding, and development — intrinsically entwined with that of smartphones and social media. Since 2012, deep learning-focused research has yielded impressive results. First, computer vision systems and then, since the ascent of Google’s transformer architecture in 2017, large language models. In merely a decade the AI community has developed a better understanding of neural networks and scaling laws, built larger and better-quality datasets, and designed powerful hardware, increasingly well-suited to handle demanding AI workloads. From 2012 to…
