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Two apparently disconnected signals, with no relationship other than a mild thematic affiliation, instead they are two precious clues of what is happening in this new phase of artificial intelligence AI.
A new phase that however it is very compressed from a temporal point of view and follows the return of AI, a novelty for the general public since ChatGPT hit the headlines but not for expertswho have known its definitions and ambitions since the Nocevento 1950s.
After crossing a long cold hell, a frost that almost killed it, in the last fifteen years AI has made its return from a scientific and technological point of view. But still It wasn’t clear what it’s made of: meat or fish? Good or bad? Instrument of democracy and emancipation or of economic insecurity and exploitation?
Exhibit A: “Believe the AI Hype”
The first signal comes from the columnist and “editor at large” (a way of saying that he is a senior special correspondent, with great experience of the market he follows) of Wired USA, Steven Levy, says it bluntly in one of his editorials: “According to some experts, generative AI has stopped getting smarter. Instead, the explosive demos of OpenAI, Microsoft and Google that kicked off the week show that there are still many changes to come.” In short, the party isn’t over.
And Levy is very good to feel the “temperature” of Silicon Valley. That valley of technology but also of the very rapid investments made by venture capital for the most promising startups or from tech giants such as Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet.
Companies that are financed with hundreds of millions of dollars, such as Suno, the latest in a very long list of financings which in total will raise more than 300 billion dollars in 2024 alone. Suno which has the ambition of becoming “the ChatGPT of music”. The results are not there yet, but there is a lot of attention in the hype.
And even if AIs are black boxes, black boxes inside which you can’t understand what’s inside (but there are those who try to decode how they work), Microsoft is already at work to give companies the opportunity to finalize the training of small “local” AI: corporate or personal. They will be used to update tasks, to give space to creative work and everything else that is not normal work today. As repetitive as you want, but all in all quite widespread in society among people who don’t have extraordinary skills and are trying to make a living with a normal job.
Exhibit B: the voice of Scarlett Johansson
As we continue with the news we learn that the actress Scarlett Johansson was very angry and made fire and lightning with OpenAI because the company, after not receiving her permission, still decided to go ahead with a Sky personal assistant” who speaks with what is essentially his voice. Why her? Because she was the protagonist of the meme film of the digital assistants of the future “She”, story of a programmer who falls in love with his AI personal assistant.
This clear demonstration of abuse by OpenAI has been interpreted as a very clear signal of what the philosophy of this company and the other future big names in AI tech is: “This is the no-nonsense logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalistic and paternalistic. The idea of such a small group of people legislating themselves to build civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair. Yet they will move forward because they have a vision of the future and the means to try to achieve it”.
And this is what is happening: the internal OpenAI team that was responsible for understanding what the long-term risks of AI could be lost its leadership and was then closed, firing some and moving others to another task. The future of AI is not for the good of humanity but for the profit of those who have the means to build it. Companies that are doing everything to have extremely “tough” regulations to prevent others from doing the same thing, and maintain the advantage they have achieved.
Meanwhile, there are those who are doing badly
Whether AI is economically revolutionary for everyone has yet to be demonstrated. For now it is a game for very few. For the older ones. For those who have the money to do things. For others, it’s a lottery. A sort of big gamble to try to make money quickly, without any real possibility of building something lasting. It’s the logic of speculative startups: the money arrives, the business is built and then everything is sold before the problems come to a head. The business plan doesn’t even contemplate the possibility of going positive.
One case is Humane, the company founded in 2018 by two former Apples who made the business mature to the right point, put a device on the market (the Pin) which was panned by the American press, started making layoffs and now it turns out that they are selling everything, company and technologies. We are talking about several hundred million dollars for a product that doesn’t sell.
The consequences
Arrogance, “hubris” as those who speak well say, and the self-decided right to do what one wants they are inherent in the development of any transformative technology. A small group of people must feel confident enough in their vision to bring it into the world and ask the rest of us to adapt. But generative AI extends this dynamic to the point of absurdity. It is a technology that requires a mentality of what American philosophers call “manifest destiny”, that is, of domination and conquest.
We cannot steal to build the future if we believe that it has always belonged to us. But that’s what’s happening. What is happening instead was perfectly described in an article last year: “As with other great projects of the 20th century, citizens who vote [in America, NdR] they had a say in both the objectives and execution of the Apollo missions. Altman clarified that we are no longer made in that world. Instead of waiting for a time like that to return, or devoting his energy to making sure it does, he is moving full throttle ahead in our current reality.”
The title of the Atlantic article? Simple and deadly: “Does Sam Altman know what he is creating?”. All the articles that talk about Artificial Intelligence are in the dedicated section of macitynet.
