More and faster
I've come to appreciate the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once as an allegory for how artificial intelligence (and maybe technology more broadly) is transforming our society. No spoilers here if you haven't seen the movie.
I'll be honest, I found the movie difficult to watch (although it is a good, maybe great movie). Three reasons:
Similarly the pace of AI is constantly increasing, there is a steady stream of surprises, and the applications of AI are appearing in everything, everywhere, and all at once...
First the unrelenting fast pace -- there is a useful AI benchmark called MLPerf which allows researchers to compare the performance of different AI systems to one another by running typical tasks: image classification, object detection, speech recognition, etc. Improvements in MLPerf are indicators of improvements in all of the uses of AI and also in the pace of research work to improve AI since faster systems mean more can be done in less time.
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If improvement was only driven by Moore's Law, we should expect that MLPerf would double roughly every 2.5 years along with the increasing cost/performance improvements in computer chips. But instead MLPerf has doubled just in the past year -- and has been doubling each year for several years. This is because there is a compounding effect that includes chip design but also software and system architecture and even innovations in basic concepts like how to represent numbers in computer systems -- wrap your head around "posits" which improves on the standard floating point number system for computation.
Posits is an example of the surprising things constantly happening -- reinvent something as fundamental as numbers? Sounds like something out of an absurdist comedy-drama film... Almost every day there are surprising new uses or advances in artificial intelligence - a quick Google News search on the topic of artificial intelligence this morning mentions military applications, the pharmaceutical industry, even how a fire department can use AI.
A new book (not even available until November 15th) called Power and Prediction makes the last point about how AI is all encompassing -- because it transforms a core part of how human organizations are structured and how all work is done:
...the two key decision-making ingredients are prediction and judgment... The rise of AI is shifting prediction from humans to machines, relieving people from this cognitive load while increasing the speed and accuracy of decisions.
Where we are: The pace of change is increasing - you aren't keeping up, I'm not keeping up, even the researchers in the field are not keeping up with how quickly new capabilities are being developed. That results in the sense that surprising things are constantly happening -- because the pace is so fast things that we hadn't thought possible, or hadn't even contemplated, suddenly are real. For me a recent example was Facebook (Meta) extending the idea of AI image generators like OpenAI's DALL-E to develop an AI movie generator. And we see these surprising advances coming from all directions - every industry, every activity, and every technology is being transformed by artificial intelligence. All at once.
What’s next?
2 年So is anyone using it to either optimize or win in financial markets? Surely an AI-based approach would turn such pursuits into child's play - at least until every ETF was based on near-perfect AI derived information. And then would there even be a market if everyone was making the same decisions at the same time with the same perfect information?