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What Happens When AI Replaces Workers? šŸ¤–šŸ‘€

Plus, Kickboxing Robots, the Pope on AI, and AGI in 4 Years? 🧠

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This Week in AI 🧠

Pope Leo XIV will focus his attention on ensuring AI is safe and positive for humanity

Pope Leo XIV has made curtailing the risks of runaway AI a defining mission of his pontificate. He is positioning himself as a guardian of the social fabric in the face of unchecked modern technologies, echoing the stance of his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who promoted workers’ rights during the Industrial Revolution. The Vatican, under Leo’s predecessor, has been actively involved in AI ethics, advocating for the development of accountable and socially beneficial AI.

Mary Meeker is a legend in the tech world. She has sometimes been dubbed the ā€œQueen of the Internet.ā€ Her annual presentations on the state of the internet and tech industry were always devoured by the tech crowd the moment they were released. She’s now shining her insightful light on AI, and the new report is well worth your time to look through. It’s filled with charts, graphs, and thoughtful insights into the current state of the AI industry and where AI is heading next.

Writing in the opinion section of The New York Times, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has emphasized the need for transparency and regulation to ensure that AI companies properly test their new models for safety. Amodei highlights the potential risks of AI and advocates for a federal transparency standard requiring companies to disclose their testing and evaluation policies. Amodei believes this standard will encourage industry learning, help Congress understand AI development, and ensure responsible AI practices.

Quick Hits

Video: Echo Hunter (AI-generated short film)

Want to see how good AI-generated video is now? Look no further than this fully AI-generated short film. The near-future sci-fi short is named ā€œEcho Hunter,ā€ and the images produced using tools from Arcana Labs are impressive. (22 mins)

Synthetic’s Take: Remember, AI is the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s only going to get more capable from here on out. I can’t wait to watch the AI-generated sequel I’ve been waiting for now for 40 years…Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 2! 🚘 It’s only a matter of time.

AI Tech and Innovation šŸ’”

The world’s first robot kickboxing tournament was held in China

In case you missed it, China recently hosted an unusual kickboxing tournament, one for robots. Unitree provided six of their G1 EDU robots for the tournament, which were controlled remotely by humans. The robots were pre-trained for combat, where they learned various techniques, including punches, hooks, jabs, kicks, and more. Check out the article to see the robots in action!

Groq is a lesser-known but important tech company. They build chips to accelerate AI inference, the computing needed to use large language models like ChatGPT and Claude. Nvidia’s chips are used to train these models, and also for inference. Groq refers to their chips as LPUs (Language Processing Units). Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross believes the next frontier for AI will be models that can not only retrieve and present existing information but also develop novel theories and approaches of their own: AIs that can invent.

In related news, Sam Altman has recently made similar comments, expecting AI will soon be able to ā€œdiscover new knowledgeā€ and solve business problems.

AI Insights šŸ”®

Spike Jonze’s prescient sci-fi movie ā€œHerā€ showed us what AI relationships might be like in the future. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a must-watch movie on AI.

AI Investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is sounding the alarm about AI systems marketed as digital friends or romantic partners. ā€œI don’t think any AI tool today is capable of being a friend…and I think if it’s pretending to be a friend, you’re actually harming the person in so doing,ā€ said Hoffman. His remarks stand in stark contrast to those of Mark Zuckerberg, who views chatbots as a potential cure for the loneliness epidemic and has plans to promote AIs as digital friends.

Speaking at SXSW London, Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said he expects AI to be a bigger transformation for humanity than the Industrial Revolution. Hassabis is a deep thinker on the implications of AI for humanity. He said, ā€œI think new jobs will appear, new very valuable jobs,ā€ and recommended that students today study STEM subjects.

In related news, billionaire Mark Cuban believes that AI will create new roles, rather than eliminate jobs, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has pushed back on concerns that AI will make up to half of Google’s engineers redundant, citing expansion plans.

Now, for the counterargument….

Last week, Synthetic reported that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. The shift to AGI could lead to widespread technological unemployment, posing a challenge to the traditional work-based economy. While Universal Basic Income (UBI) is often proposed as a solution, Time Magazine argues that UBI may not provide people with sufficient bargaining power or societal influence, and that business leaders should focus on using AI to augment work rather than automate it.

ā

No business has become the jewel of its industry by just cost-cutting

MIT Economist and Nobel Laureate, Daron Acemoglu, speaking about the importance of using AI to do more than automate tasks

In related news, Business Insider has gone ā€˜all-in on AI’ and laid off 21% of its staff. AI is already erasing some entry-level coding jobs. CNBC’s Jim Cramer says AI might be ā€˜the most important force’ when it comes to the future of employment. Axios’s CEO recently warned that AI will ā€˜reorder society’ and told people, ā€œWhat we’re saying is: just pay attention.ā€

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s "The Future of Everythingā€ Conference in New York City, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said that AGI (human-level intelligence) will be reached within the next few years. ā€œI think it is possible that in the next four years, we do approximate something like [AGI], and it’s a testament to how fast things are moving,ā€ he said.

Synthetic’s Take: This is the central issue of our time that nobody is talking about. Or if they’re talking about it, they’re not talking about it enough. Whether AGI (human-level intelligence) arrives next year or two decades from now, its impact on employment will be profound. Some jobs will remain, no doubt about that, but there won’t be enough to go around. We need to start having serious conversations about what a post-AGI economy looks like, how it will work, and how we can make life amazing and full of purpose for everyone in a world without work.

Toolkit for the Future šŸ› ļø

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