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Science & Tech
It all started with gaming, modifications for joysticks, and controllers that allow disabled veterans to once again play their favorite video games. Now, Microsoft’s Inclusive Tech Lab is a haven of innovation and creativity, featuring toys and tools created by and for the disability community. Come along as Program Manager Solomon Romney takes GZERO on an exclusive tour of the lab making accessibility awesome.
Watch more interviews from Global Stage.
Hard Numbers: Jamie Dimon’s promise, The godmother of AI, Some Japanese companies ignore AI, College football doppelgangers
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon speaks at the Boston College Chief Executives Club luncheon in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., November 23, 2021.
5,000: Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said that he has about 2,000 employees working on data analytics, machine learning, and AI, and he predicts that number will blossom to 5,000 in the next few years. He also said the company has 400 AI-related projects, which should double to 800 in the next year alone.
1 billion: Computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, known as the “godmother of AI,” founded a startup called World Labs four months ago. It’s already valued at $1 billion. World Labs is a computer vision company, focused on understanding three-dimensional objects in the physical world. The company raised $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz and other venture capital firms in its latest funding round.
40: While nearly a quarter of Japanese companies have adopted AI, more than 40% told Reuters in a survey that they have no plans to do so. Another 35% say that they have plans to adopt the technology in the future. The AI industry is trying to prove itself not only to consumers but also businesses, so corporate adoption is key to its long-term success.
11,000: The college football video game “EA Sports College Football 25” is already a sensation in the US — a long-anticipated follow-up after the game studio ceased its college football title more than a decade ago. In order to build the real on-field players, EA used AI technology to turn 11,000 player headshots into in-game avatars in mere seconds.OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
OpenAI is going mini. On July 18, the company behind ChatGPT announced GPT-4o mini, its latest model. It’s meant to be a cheaper, faster, and less energy intensive version of the technology. The smaller model is marketed to developers who rely on OpenAI’s language models and want to save money.
The move also comes as AI companies are trying to cut their own costs, reduce their energy dependence, and answer calls from critics and regulators to lower their energy burden. Training and running AI often requires access to electricity-guzzling data centers, which in turn require copious amounts of water to keep them from overheating.
Moving forward, look for AI companies to offer a multitude of options to cost-conscious and energy-conscious users.
To see where data centers have cropped up in North America, check out our latest Graphic Truth here.EncroChat and Europol logos are seen in this illustration taken, June 27, 2023.
Europol, Europe’s policing agency, said it’s seen a marked increase in AI-generated child sexual abuse material, aka CSAM. And they predicted it’ll get worse: “The use of AI which allows child sex offenders to generate or alter child sex abuse material is set to further proliferate in the near future," the agency said in a statement. The technology also makes it easier for perpetrators to cyberbully and sexually extort victims for financial gain.
In a new report, Europol warns of the dangers of deepfake child abuse material. But it also says that the advent of AI makes it difficult to detect what’s real and what’s fake. And AI-generated images could be trained on real CSAM. Massive AI training datasets have been found to include numerous instances of CSAM.A kamikaze drone with a warhead is performing a demonstration flight during the 2nd Drone Racing Tournament by the Federation of Military Technological Sports of Ukraine in Bilohorodka, Kyiv region, north-central Ukraine, on July 21, 2024.
Ukrainian startups are rushing to manufacture AI-enabled drones that could give them an edge in the ongoing war with Russia. Swarmer is one such company that’s working on the technology, which allows for automated drone swarms in which humans only intervene to sign off on aerial strikes.
AI-enabled drones could also prevent Russian signal-jamming because they’re not dependent on maintaining connections with human pilots, a problem that increasingly undermines existing drones. By one estimate, Ukrainian drones are only achieving a 30-50% target hit rate currently, but that could improve to 80% with AI, Max Makarchuk of Ukrainian accelerator Brave1 told Reuters.
Ukraine has become a testing ground for AI warfare. While much of that technology comes from US companies, the need for defense technology has also spurred innovation in the domestic Ukrainian market.VP pick United States Senator JD Vance Republican of Ohio and Usha Vance after Former US President Donald J Trumps speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the Fiserv Forum on Thursday, July 18, 2024. Monday night was Trumps first appearance since a rally in Pennsylvania, where he sustained injuries from an alleged bullet grazing his ear. Trump recounted the story in his speech, and also talked about Biden, immigration, and other topics.
On July 15, Donald Trump announced that he has selected JD Vance as his running mate. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, rose to prominence after publishing his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” but his humble roots took him first to Yale Law School and then to the world of venture capital. He’s hailed as a politician with strong ties to Silicon Valley, and also as a politician fiercely critical of Big Tech. “What do you get when you cross a tech bro with a luddite?” Eurasia Group's Jon Lieber responded when we asked him to summarize Vance’s views.
This apparent contradiction is further highlighted by Vance’s recent statements on artificial intelligence. He has advocated for reduced regulation of the AI sector, and has claimed that tech companies’ focus on existential risks of AI are a lobbying tactic to elicit friendlier regulations.
He also shows a surprising regard for FTC chair Lina Khan’s leadership on antitrust enforcement under Joe Biden, saying that Khan has been “doing a pretty good job” especially in bringing suits against bloated tech companies. Khan notably supports AI regulation.
“I would assume someone who puts the concerns of working people and families first and foremost in his policy orientation would be relatively hostile to specific policies that accelerated the adoption of disruptive technologies,” Lieber notes. “But on the other hand, I would also think this will result in only a limited number of policies that actually attempted to curtail them.”
Lieber suggests that Vance's policy focus might include “restrictions on minors’ access to social media, data privacy rules, and investigations into tech companies for monopolistic practices.” He sees Vance as fundamentally opposed to centralized power, which could have mixed implications for AI innovation.
“This could be either good for AI innovation if you think it will happen in a decentralized way, or bad for AI innovation if you think it can only come from large incumbents with massive resources to spend on energy, compute, etc.,” Lieber said.
Some of Vance’s contradictions may become clearer over time, but they could easily be dwarfed by the whims and policy goals of Trump.
In this episode of GZERO AI, Taylor Owen, host of the Machines Like Us podcast, explores how artificial intelligence is turbocharging the stock market and transforming our economy. With AI driving the S&P 500 to new heights and drastically boosting NVIDIA's stock, researchers predict a future where we could be 1,000 times wealthier. However, Owen raises critical questions about whether this rapid growth is sustainable or simply a bubble ready to burst.
So whatever your lingering skepticism of this current moment of AI hype might be, one thing is undeniable: AI is turbocharging the stock market and the economy more broadly.
The S&P 500 hit an all-time high this year, largely driven by AI. NVIDIA's stock jumped 700% since the launch of ChatGPT, at one point becoming the most valuable company in the world. And some researchers think this is going to get even crazier. They argue that we could see 30% per capita economic growth by 2100 because of AI. What this means is that in 25 years of 30% per capita growth, we would be 1,000 times richer than we are now.
But what are these wild predictions based on? Really comes down till human labor being replaced by AI. These economists argue that AI could replace humans and that machines could do all sorts of things that humans can't or things that we can already do much better. Perhaps more importantly though, humans aren't constrained by the number of humans we have in the workforce. We can scale labor in a way unconstrained by human capacity. This fundamentally changes, they argue, the core dynamics of the economy.
But these are still predictions, and they're wild speculations, and they're often being promoted by the very same people who will benefit the most from the hype around AI. There's just no good evidence at this point that these things are necessarily going to come to fruition. And even if this wealth is generated, this 1,000 times richer than we are now wealth, there's no guarantee how it's going to be distributed, who will get it, who will benefit and who won't. It's pretty clear that wealth is likely to trickle up to those that own and control these technologies, as they have in the past. It's also clear that those that are most precarious in the workforce will be the most vulnerable and likely the most harmed. This is almost certainly, if we're talking about machines replacing humans, going to be women and minorities who are overrepresented in the service workforce.
Some argue that UBI could be a solution to this, that we should simply take this excess wealth and distribute it to all of us so that we don't have to work. But there's a real problem here. People find meaning in their work. I recently spoke to Rana Foroohar, a global economic reporter for the Financial Times, and she made this case really powerfully to me that we derive meaning from work, and if you take that away, there are going to be serious political repercussions. We've already started to see these. Because of all of this, Rana thinks we're in a bubble. She thinks the economy simply can't run this hot for this long. It would be historically unprecedented, she argues, for this to go on for very much longer. But also the narratives she argues about why this economic growth is going to happen simply are too tenuous to support the economic growth that's being built on it. And this for her is a clear sign that we're in a bubble. When you have a single narrative that doesn't allow for any contradictions, this clear narrative of a certainty of a path that is supporting a huge amount of economic activity, that is the sign of a bubble.
Finally, she argues that economic growth is simply too concentrated. Too few people are seeing the benefits of this at the moment. These are the six or seven tech companies who are responsible for the bulk of the value being generated around AI. This concentration is not broadly good for society. If a tech bubble collapses though, we are all on the hook for it. Like any bubble, we as a society, our pension funds, our investments, our retirements, the rest of the economy are being floated by this bubble, so we need to think really carefully about how and when this deflates.
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