Weekend Warp

In technology, there are decades where nothing happens. And then there are weeks where decades happen. In the last few months, technology seems to be moving at warp speed. To make some sense out of this, I pick three to five stories every week which are the most significant of all.

If I claimed last time that it was a quiet week, this one was quite a week!

It started off explosively with Joe Biden and the White House issuing an executive order on safe, secure and trustworthy AI. Everyone thought that the US will trail the EU and UK on AI Safety, but Joe Biden was having none of it.

See more here

The order has some very strong statements and some loopholes, but it is a good start. I published a summary of it on LinkedIn here .

The Executive Order must have taken Rishi Sunak by surprise as he prepared to inaugurate the AI Summit at Bletchley Park, UK. Kamala Harris travelled for it, so did the Indian IT Minister and Elon Musk; and importantly so did China, which was a coup by the Brits. In many forums, I have talked about the fact that we need global regulation for AI, especially Frontier AI, along the lines of the Nuclear IAEA or CERN (originally proposed by Gary Marcus . This seems to be step along that direction, as the race for regulating AI complements the race for innovating AI.

Read more here .

Meanwhile, closer home, Indian IT major Tech Mahindra announced that it intended to launch Project Indus, its LLM designed for Hindi and its 37 dialects, by the end of December or early January. Tech Mahindra CEO had taken on a public challenge from Sam Altman to do this earlier this year, and it will be interesting to see the outcome.

Read more here

BONUS: OpenAI got into the spirit of things and announced a team to tackle Super Alignment. “We need scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us. To solve this problem within four years, we’re starting a new team, co-led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, and dedicating 20% of the compute we’ve secured to date to this effort.”, they announced. Again, will be interesting to watch – alignment itself is a challenge, super alignment will be another order of magnitude.

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The space is certainly heating up….at warp speed.