Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Pop. ScaleAI’s valuation could rise by about 80% to $13 billion in a fundraising round led by Accel, while Amazon made its largest investment in a firm, putting $2.75 billion into Anthropic (though it’s unclear whether that includes cloud credits). Meanwhile, Huawei’s earnings more than doubled last year, despite U.S. export blacklists.

➘ BREAK THINGS: Drop. Reddit’s stock is already coming down from its high. It fell more than 30% from its peak on Tuesday. That’s a bad sign for another meme-like stock, Donald Trump’s newly public media company, whose shares have fallen about 12% since its market debut this week.

Sometimes virtual models are less drama than human versions. The Cluless agency in Spain created AI-powered Aitana, a pink-haired, 25-year-old from Barcelona, after it lost projects because of problems that came up with human models and influencers. Aitana can earn up to €10,000 a month but her average compensation is about €3,000.

“We did it so that we could make a better living and not be dependent on other people who have egos, who have manias, or who just want to make a lot of money by posing,” Rubén Cruz, founder of The Clueless agency, told Euronews

But other problems can come up in managing AI-powered virtual influencers. The creators of Alba Renai, the host of a special segment on Spain’s version of Survivors, have had to reassure the public that she has not taken anyone’s job. A team of 32 people work on the Alba project, Luis Movilla, director of Branded Content & Experience at Be a Lion, told El Pais. So he argued the fake model has created real job opportunities.

Juan M. Lavista Ferres is the corporate vice president and chief data scientist of the AI for Good Lab at Microsoft. His new book, co-written by colleague William Weeks, is AI for Good.

Q: What are some ways people are using [AI] that show the benefits?

A: Remember that 4 billion people in the world do not have access to doctors. That’s half of the world. Currently, the only solution we have right now as a society is to make sure that the doctors we have are more productive, so we can help get to more people.

There’s one initiative that we’re working on now in Mexico and Colombia focusing on retinopathy of prematurity, one of the leading causes of blindness in children. It affects babies who are born prematurely.

There are only 200,000 ophthalmologists in the world and millions of babies born prematurely. It’s physically impossible to diagnose the disease for every baby. We’ve got an AI model that runs on a phone that can diagnose the disease as well as an ophthalmologist.

Q: The AI landscape is moving so fast. Do you think within a year, all of these examples in your book will look old?

A: Not so much. We have to remember that AI is not new. We’ve been working with some of these algorithms for the last 20 or 30 years. Even deep learning and neural nets have been around for over 30 years. What has dramatically changed is our ability to train these very big, large language models. When I started working in AI 20 years ago, I realized that natural language processing is even more difficult than working with images. Text is a really difficult problem. In large language models, it’s been a step function. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would not have thought we’d get here this fast.

There are a lot of huge problems that we’re revisiting because before we couldn’t solve them, and now we can. But there’s still a lot of problems that haven’t changed. And we can still solve with things we were doing five years ago. So we’ll still run classification models in 15 years or 20 years.

Q: Five years from now, do you see superintelligent, general purpose models — some people might call it AGI -— helping to solve these problems around the world?

A: I usually try to stay away from the AGI conversation in general. I think these models will continue to become better. The reason I shy away from the AGI conversation is that the way people define AGI is through tests. One of the tests is the IKEA test. We used to have the Turing test. And of course a lot of LLMs will pass the Turing test. The IKEA test is when a [robotic AI] agent will go to your house, open a box and assemble furniture. I would not pass that test.

I focus on: We have this technology. It can be used to solve problems. The discussion should be about that.

These models like GPT are much more general now. We used to train very specific models. Now we have zero shot learning, where we don’t need a training set. Just put the information there and the models are able to solve problems that before, we would need to train models for. That’s already showing value from a general purpose perspective.

I’m still focusing on: We have a problem, we have a solution, we have a tool to solve a problem.

Models will continue to keep improving. Clearly what we saw in November 2022, it was a step function. But I don’t expect another big step function.

The amount in damages that three school districts in Canada, including Toronto and Ottawa, are seeking from Meta, Snap and TikTok. The school officials claim that these social media companies are hurting children’s ability to learn. For example, the lawsuit argues that because students are addicted to the apps, about half of them in Ontario aren’t getting enough sleep and their mental health is being harmed. As a result, districts have had to hire additional staff to help them.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is making the rounds this week. After meeting with business executives from Blackstone, Qualcomm, FedEx and other companies, he hosted Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Wednesday. The Chinese leader encouraged greater cooperation after the Netherlands, under pressure from the U.S. government, blocked ASML from exporting certain chip-related products to China.

According to Chinese state media, Xi also said that “no force can stop the pace of China’s scientific and technological progress.” It’s another example of how much geopolitics is roiling the tech industry, with many companies stuck in the middle. One question that still looms for ASML is whether The Hague will allow it to service equipment already sold to customers in China, with a license permitting such work expiring soon.

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