Lifeboat Foundation

A new career is emerging with the spread of generative AI applications like ChatGPT: prompt engineering, the art (not science) of crafting effective instructions for AI models.

“In ten years, half of the world’s jobs will be in prompt engineering,” declared Robin Li, cofounder and CEO of Chinese AI giant, Baidu. “And those who cannot write prompts will be obsolete.”

That may be a bit of big tech hyperbole, but there’s no doubt that prompt engineers will become the wizards of the AI world, coaxing and guiding AI models into generating content that is not only relevant but also coherent and consistent with the desired output.

AI-related jobs are on the rise but funding has taken a dip.

The technology world goes through waves of terminologies. Last year, was much about building the metaverse until it turned to artificial intelligence (AI) which has occupied the top news spots almost everywhere. To know whether this wave will last or wither off, one needs to look at some trusted sources in the domain, such as the one released by Stanford University.

For years now, the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford has been releasing its AI Index on an annual basis.

Continue reading “New Stanford report highlights the potential, costs, and risks of AI” »

Is artificial intelligence on the path to replacing people and jobs? Not quite. GSB professors argue that instead of viewing #AI as a competitor, we should be embracing it as a collaborator.

“The idea that AI is aimed toward automation is a misconception. There’s so much more opportunity for this technology to augment humans than the very narrow notion of replacing humans.” Professor Fei-Fei Li, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
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The non-profit said powerful AI systems should only be developed “once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.” It cited potential risks to humanity and society, including the spread of misinformation and widespread automation of jobs.

The letter urged AI companies to create and implement a set of shared safety protocols for AI development, which would be overseen by independent experts.

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet’s AI lab DeepMind, and notable AI professors have also signed the letter. At the time of publication, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had not added his signature.

The latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the US and eurozone, according to research by Goldman Sachs.

The investment bank said on Monday that “generative” AI systems such as ChatGPT, which can create content that is indistinguishable from human output, could spark a productivity boom that would eventually raise annual global gross domestic product by 7 percent over a 10-year period.

But if the technology lived up to its promise, it would also bring “significant disruption” to the labor market, exposing the equivalent of 300 million full-time workers across big economies to automation, according to Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, the paper’s authors. Lawyers and administrative staff would be among those at greatest risk of becoming redundant.

A new study finds that AI tools could more quickly handle at least half of the tasks that auditors, interpreters and writers do now.

Researchers at OpenAI have worked out the potential exposure to AI different occupations face — and its impact is widespread.

If “junk” DNA goes toxic, does that suggest it had an original normal function? See the conclusion of this new paper, “Native functions of short tandem repeats” (emphasis added):

Historically, repetitive elements within human genomes have been viewed as mostly unregulated ‘junk DNA’ that is not under selective evolutionary pressure. As such expansions of these repetitive elements are unfortunate accidents which become apparent and important only when they elicit highly penetrant and syndromic human diseases. Consistent with this line of reasoning, the field of REDs [Repetitive Element Diseases] has largely focused on emergent toxic mechanisms as drivers of disease only in the setting of large STR [Short Tandem Repeats] expansions rather than considering their pathology as alterations in the native functions played by these repeats in their normal genomic contexts. Here, we propose re-framing the discussion around repetitive elements in general — and STRs in particular — within human genomes.

Presented by Intel.

Every day around the world, companies leverage artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery, and transform consumer and business services. Regrettably, the employment of AI is not occurring evenly. McKinsey’s ‘The State of AI in 2022’ report documents that adoption of AI by organizations has stalled at 50%. AI leaders are pulling ahead of the pack. One reason is 53% of AI projects fail to get to production. As the benefits of AI to everyone are too great and the issues with AI being in the hands of only a few are too concerning, that it is an opportune time to survey the challenges of going from concept to deployment.