The Great Time-Out

Crisis presents opportunity

[Excerpts published in Korean in Chosun Ilbo Newspaper]

We are never going to return to the world we had, although we may eventually reach some kind of stable equilibrium. The pandemic is forcing us to adopt technologies of telepresence, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotic deliveries, avatars, and additive manufacturing at a much faster rate than before. This is enabling these technologies to ‘cross the chasm’ as Geoffrey Moore would put it, between the early adopters, and the mainstream. Now even the older generations are visiting their doctors remotely, whilst distributed production centres create critically-needed PPE supplies through 3D printing.

Transformer-based AI is bringing another revolution comparable to the advent of Deep Learning ten years ago. Deep Learning techniques showed us the power of throwing very large datasets at problems, and the disproportionate benefit from doing so. Transformer technologies (such as GPT-3 recently released by OpenAI) show something similar, except with the amount of compute time and parameters instead of data. GPT-3 is a very generalisable algorithm for making sense of text that has been trained on most of the public internet. It is capable of a great many feats, including translation between languages, imitating not only styles but individual writers, computing high school math problems, turning pictures into code, even suggesting reasonable dosages of medicine for patients with a variety of conditions and body masses. GPT-3 is very convincing. It almost has a spark of life about it, and interacting with it can be truly eerie. It’s only faking understanding, but that illusion is unnervingly powerful, and often hilarious too. All of it is accessible via a handy API—no need to code or host your own solutions.

This is a huge leap ahead from the previous state of play. AI is coming out of the lab. It is finally becoming useful for tasks most people actually care about. We can expect stupendously large models of even greater capability to emerge very shortly (in a matter of months). For these reasons, I believe that 2021 is going to be a moment of discontinuity in machine intelligence. A Sputnik moment is nigh that will awaken everyone to the possibilities of these technologies, creating a landrush for immediately deployable applications.

One of the greatest questions of this year has been how far we risk treading upon privacy and other liberties in the name of preventing disease. I am proud to have contributed to the Contact Tracing Apps / Contact Tracing Technologies guidelines from the IEEE Standards Association, which aims to help secure such systems, as well as the organizations deploying them.