Much of the current AI advance seems to have arrived out of nowhere. Not so; it was a series of advances steadily taking place over decades. The article below from MIT Technology Review sketches the significant steps along the way.
Perhaps knowing the past we might get some sense of what we are in for in the coming months and years in the way of further advancements. Or we might just get a sense of the inevitability of further progress toward general AI and smarter-than-human tools for “everything” we do.
To be sure greatly improved AI is coming soon…just this week in late September 2023, Google announced many advancements to their AI “Bard,” while rumor has it that their big giant leap forward “Genesis” is not far off and promises to potentially leapfrog ChatGPT4. OpenAI has now incorporated Dall-E their image-from-text generator into a coming soon version of ChatGPT.
Projections being cited by AI developers in the know state further amazing advances in the next two to five years. All of which is to say, those who want to be relevant to the AI economy need to work hard to just keep up with the advancements. To say nothing of really getting a grasp of what this means for our civilization, and for ourselves.
's where it came from | MIT Technology ReviewOne example of keeping up is a copyediting app called Grammarly that works by being plugged into various tools, including this PSA webpost writing window from WordPress.
Grammarly has a free version, which is good at finding typos, misspellings, and extra spaces. But there is also a Grammarly Premier paid version, that goes much further into the text to recommend all sorts of changes or “improvements”. Admin decided to give it a try right in the middle of doing this post. Clearly, it’s all about AI in the way it suggests text changes, which are not just limited to grammar but include stylistic approaches as well.
And it’s here now. Not sure it’s great as it’s an added level of writing overhead. But one is tempted to include ALL the suggestions with one click without even looking at them all. That seems a good example of the slippery slope we will encounter ever more frequently as AI advances. Do we really want AI to do most of the work instead of us? Maybe we like our quirky individual style and don’t want to “surrender”?