Headline, December 03 2023/ ''' HEAVENS A.I. HELLISH '''

''' HEAVENS

 A.I.

 HELLISH '''

THE FIELD OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE  has the intensity and the audacity of the hottest of all startup sectors. While talking with A.I.researchers over the past year or so, I have often felt -

I was on one of these airport moving walkways - going three miles per hour and they were on walkways going 4,000 miles per hour. The researchers  kept telling me that this phase of A.I.'s history is so exhilarating precisely because nobody can predict what will happen next. 

'' The point of being an A.I. researcher is you should understand what's going on.We're constantly being surprised,'' the Stanford Ph.D. candidate Rishi Bommasani told me.

ONE OF THE NICE THINGS about OpenA.I. is that it was built on distrust. It began as a nonprofit research lab because its founders didn't think artificial intelligence should be pioneered by commercial firms, which are driven overwhelmingly by the profit motive.

As it evolved, OpenAI turned into what you might call a fruitful contradiction : a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit board with a corporate culture somewhere in between.

Many of the young people at the company seem simultaneously motivated by the scientist's desire to discover, the capitalist's desire to ship product and the do-gooder's desire to do this all safely.

The events of the past week - Sam Altman's firing, all the drama, his rehiring - revolve around one central question : Is this fruitable contradiction sustainable?

Can one organization, or one person, maintain the brain of a scientist, the drive of a capitalist and the cautious heart of a regulatory agency? Or, as charlie Warzel wrote in the Atlantic, will the money always win out?

It's important to remember that A.I. is quite different from other part of the tech world.  It is [ or at least was ] more academic. A.I. is a field that had research lineage stretching back centuries.

Even today, many of the giants of the field are primarily researchers, not entrepreneurs - people like Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Turing Award [ the Nobel Prize of computing ] together in 2018 and now disagree about where A.I. is taking us.

It's only in the last several years that academic researchers have been leaving the university aeries and flocking to industry.

Researchers at places like Alphabet, the  parent company of Google; Microsoft; OpenAI; and Meta, which owns Facebook, still communicate with one another by publishing research papers, the way professors do. 

The people in A.I. seem to be experiencing  radically different brain states all at once.  I've found it incredibly hard to write about A.I. because it is literally  unknowable whether this technology is leading us to heaven or hell; and so my attitude about it shifts with my mood.

The podcaster and M.I.T. scientist Lex Fridman, who has emerged as the father confessor of the tech world, expressed the rapid-fire range of emotions I encountered again and again :

'' You sit back, both proud, like a parent, but almost like proud and scared that this thing will be much smarter than me. Like both pride and sadness, almost like a melancholy feeling, but ultimately joy.''

All Battling for the safe future of A.I.

The honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Artificial Intelligence, Fears and Future, continues.  The World Students Society thanks author David Brooks.

With most loving and respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society - for every subject in the world - and then Mankind, Students, Professors and Teachers.

See You all prepare for Great Global  Elections !WOW! - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world :  wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless