| | | | | | | Presented By Deloitte | | | | Axios Future | | By Bryan Walsh ·Mar 03, 2021 | | Welcome to Axios Future, a daily podcast that offers the inside scoop on politics, technology and business. - That's not actually true — instead, I had a GPT-2 transformer model generate the sentence after the bolded beginning, in keeping with this edition's focus on AI.
- I guess the lesson is audio > words.
If you haven't subscribed, go here. Today's Smart Brevity count: 1,879 words or about 7 minutes. | | | | | | 1 big thing: AI is industrializing |  | | | Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios | | | | Artificial intelligence is becoming a true industry, with all the pluses and minuses that entails, according to a sweeping new report. Why it matters: AI is now in nearly every area of business, with the pandemic pushing even more investment in drug design and medicine. But as the technology matures, challenges around ethics and diversity will grow. Driving the news: This morning, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) released its annual AI Index, a top overview of the current state of the field. - A majority of North American AI Ph.D.s — 65% — now go into industry, up from 44% in 2010, a sign of the growing role that large companies are playing both in AI research and implementation.
- "The striking thing to me is that AI is moving from a research phase to much more of an industrial practice," says Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at HAI and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
By the numbers: Even with the pandemic, private AI investment grew by 9.3% in 2020, a bigger increase than in 2019. - For the third year in a row, however, the number of newly funded companies decreased, a sign that "we're moving from pure research and exploratory small startups to industrial-stage companies," says Brynjolfsson.
- While academia remains the single-biggest source worldwide for peer-reviewed AI papers, corporate-affiliated research now represents nearly a fifth of all papers in the U.S., making it the second-biggest source.
The catch: While the field has experienced sudden busts in the past — the "AI winters" that vaporized funding — there's little indication such a collapse is on the horizon. But industrialization comes with its own growing pains. As AI grows, the ethical challenges embedded in the field — and the fact that 45% of new AI Ph.D.s are white, compared to just about 2% who are Black — will mean "there's a new frontier of potential privacy violations and other abuses," says Brynjolfsson. - The AI Index report found that while the field of AI ethics is growing, the interest level of big companies is still "disappointingly small," says Brynjolfsson.
Details: Those growing pains are at play in one of the most exciting applications in AI today: massive text-generating models. - Systems like OpenAI's GPT-3, released last year, swallow hundreds of billions of words along the way to producing original text that can be eerily human-like in its execution.
- Text-generating AI models could help polish human-written resumes for job search, but could also potentially be used to spam corporate competitors with realistic computer-generated applicants, not to mention warp our shared reality.
What to watch: The growing geopolitical AI competition between the U.S. and China, which is of growing concern for Washington. - But while researchers in China publish the most AI papers, the U.S. still leads on quality, according to the AI Index survey.
- And while a majority of AI Ph.D.s in the U.S. are from abroad, more than 80% remain in the country when they take jobs — a sign of the lasting attraction of the U.S. tech sector.
The bottom line: AI still has a long way to go, but the challenges the field faces are shifting from what it can do to what it should do. |     | | | | | | 2. The health of AI |  2020 saw an explosion in private funding for AI-enabled medical and drug research, according to the AI Index. Why it matters: The funding flow underscores the growing effectiveness of AI in the expensive business of drug discovery — and shows a cooling off in once-hot areas like self-driving vehicles. By the numbers: The AI Index found the drug and medical industries took in by far the biggest share of overall AI private investment in 2020, absorbing more than $13.8 billion. - That's 4.5 times greater than in 2019 and nearly three times more than the next category of autonomous vehicles.
- The funding level is a reflection of the priorities of the pandemic, but it's also a sign that "the underlying technology that people have been tinkering on for a while, like protein folding and drug discovery, are coming to fruition now," says Stanford's Brynjolfsson.
Of note: One of the biggest technical accomplishments in AI last year involved Google-owned DeepMind's success in solving the protein-folding challenge, which feeds directly into the hard business of drug discovery. - "There's just too much data in this for the human brain to process in a systematic way," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel told me about his company's AI efforts in a recent interview. "But we're able to learn interesting insights thanks to the computers that none of us would have known."
Education was another pandemic-related field that saw a huge increase in funding, rising 700% to over $4 billion in 2020. The bottom line: As AI industrializes, funding will flow into the sectors where demand exists, and where clear technological advances are being made. | | | | | | | | 3. Building a true AI assistant |  | | | Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios | | | | Natural Language Processing is one of AI's hottest fields, yielding both practical products in the marketplace and bleeding-edge research. The big picture: A virtual assistant that you can truly converse with — which depends on highly accurate speech and text recognition — is still beyond the horizon, but the field is making real progress. What's happening: Ground is being gained so quickly in NLP that technical advances are threatening to outpace the benchmarks used to test for them, according to the new AI Index report. - The SuperGLUE benchmark for language understanding tasks was launched in 2019 to replace the existing GLUE standard, which had to be updated because AI models kept exceeding it.
- There was initially a nearly 20-point gap between the best AI systems and human performance, but by January, systems from Microsoft and Google had surpassed humans on SuperGLUE, which asks models to carry out tasks involving answering questions, language inferences and making sense of word disambiguation.
What they're saying: "If we can build an AI that can read PDF files, Word files, websites and the like, then we can actually build something that knows how to answer almost anything we need to deal with," says Igor Jablokov, CEO of the NLP startup Pryon. Of note: Raleigh-based Pryon last month launched its first commercial product — a virtual assistant platform that can process large amounts of data and use it to answer user questions — for banks and tech companies. The bottom line: An AI that can read is just as important as one that can write. | | | | | | | | A message from Deloitte | | The new rules of retail in 2021 | | |  | | | | The pandemic is forcing executives to transform their businesses and rewrite the rules of the retail industry. Their four priority areas: - Digital differentiation.
- Supply chain resiliency amid disruption.
- Health and safety strategies.
- Cost realignment opportunities.
| | | | | | 4. Eric Schmidt flags threat of AI-enhanced misinformation |  | | | Photo illustration: Axios Visuals. Photo: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images | | | | Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said many future attacks on the U.S. from adversaries will come in the form of intentional misinformation campaigns, including ones enhanced by the use of artificial intelligence, my Axios colleague Ina Fried reports. Why it matters: Misinformation, generated by humans but spread through social media, has already made its mark on American politics. The next wave of attacks could use AI to hone and amplify such messages. - "I think the No. 1 [type of] attacks that our country will have will be precisely disinformation because the cost is so low and the value is so high," Schmidt told Ina in an interview this week.
Schmidt's comments came in an interview after the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which he chaired, finalized its report to Congress and the White House. Between the lines: While much of that report focuses on the importance of AI to economic growth and military effectiveness, misinformation is called out specifically. "AI is deepening the threat posed by cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns that Russia, China, and others are using to infiltrate our society, steal our data, and interfere in our democracy. The limited uses of AI-enabled attacks to date represent the tip of the iceberg." — The final report of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence The big picture: The tools to create disinformation are diffuse enough, Schmidt said, that they are likely to be adopted not only by large nation-states, but also by rogue actors or terrorists. - As one countermeasure, the report points to technologies that verify the origin of a piece of information — an approach already being developed for photos and video to deal with the emerging threat of deepfakes.
| | | | | | | | 5. Worthy of your time | | Spy agencies have big hopes for AI (Economist) - Intelligence organizations are jumping aboard the AI hype train, but they face practical as well as ethical obstacles.
How one state actually managed to write rules on facial recognition (Kashmir Hill — New York Times) - One smart activist helped pushed Massachusetts to adopt common-sense regulations for police use of facial recognition that could be a model for the country.
Can auditing eliminate bias from algorithms? (Alfred Ng — The Markup) - Just as financial audits help keep businesses honest, algorithmic audits could ferret out the bias embedded in AI systems — but only if companies act on the results.
Chatbots that resurrect the dead (Edina Harbinja, Lilian Edwards, Marisa McVey — The Conversation) - Technology to build chatbots trained on the emails and text messages of the dead exists, but the ethics — and legal issues — are wide open.
| | | | | | | | 6. 1 book thing: A Nobel novelist's take on AI |  | | | Credit: Penguin Random House | | | | Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel imagines the life of a human-like domestic servant in a near-future of automated job destruction and a genetically stratified society. Why you should read it: Ishiguro, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, is one of our finest novelists, with an uncanny ability to zero in on what makes us human, as well as who and what we keep out of that circle. - He's the perfect writer to show how the rise of true AI —without threatening our place on this planet — could speed the erosion of that identity.
How it goes: "Klara and the Sun" is narrated by an AF — an "artificial friend" or android designed to serve as a companion to children — who is bought by the mother of a sick young girl named Josie. - Josie is "lifted" — a euphemism for children who have been genetically edited to increase their intelligence.
- The procedure carries a risk of sickness and even death, but so great is the pressure for success — and the fear of being left behind — that parents in the novel are willing to make the sacrifice.
Our thought bubble: This is, presumably, a state of affairs that would be completely unrecognizable to the upper-class parents engaged in today's education arms race. What they're saying: "Ishiguro's vision is at once more pragmatic and more bleak" than standard AI stories, journalist Giles Harvey wrote in a New York Times Magazine profile of Ishiguro. "Klara and her kind don't revolt; they simply allow governments and corporations to control people more efficiently." Flashback: The effect of both technology and servitude on our humanity has been an abiding interest for Ishiguro. - His dystopian 2005 novel "Never Let Me Go" portrayed human clones raised as unwilling organ donors — literally disposable servants — and there are times in his new novel when Klara sounds like a (more) robotic Stevens the butler from 1989's "The Remains of the Day."
The bottom line: What novels can do like no other art form is place us inside the consciousness of another being. - That's especially important as AI becomes more human, which risks wearing away the value of consciousness like a dollar in a time of inflation.
| | | | | | | | A message from Deloitte | | The three critical trends shaping the tech industry in 2021 | | |  | | | | Technology organizations should consider the following key strategic opportunities as they recover from COVID-19: - Redoubling digital transformation efforts.
- Reorienting and reskilling the workforce.
- Reexamining where and how manufacturing happens.
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