Dear friends,
Last week, I attended the World Economic Forum, an annual meeting of leaders in government, business, and culture at Davos, Switzerland. I spoke in a few sessions, including a lively discussion with Aiden Gomez, Daphne Koller, Yann LeCun, Kai-Fu Lee, and moderator Nicholas Thompson about the present and possible future technology developments of generative AI. You can watch it here.
The conference's themes included AI, climate change, economic growth, and global security. But to me, the whole event felt like an AI conference! (This is not just my bias. When I asked a few non-AI attendees whether they felt similarly, about three-quarters of them agreed with me.) I had many conversations along two major themes:
Business implementation of AI. Many businesses, and to a lesser extent governments, are looking at using AI and trying to develop best practices for doing so. In some of my presentations, I shared my top two tips:
AI regulation. With many governments represented at Davos, many discussions about AI regulation also took place. I was delighted that he conversation has become much more sensible compared to 6 months ago, when the narrative was driven by misleading analogies between AI and nuclear weapons and lobbyists had significant momentum pushing proposals that threatened open-source software. However, the fight against stifling regulations isn't over yet! We must continue to protect open-source software and innovation. In detail:
I also went to some climate sessions to listen to speakers. Unfortunately, I came away from them feeling more pessimistic about what governments and corporations are doing on decarbonization and climate change. I will say more about this in future letters, but:
Davos is held in a cold village where temperatures are often below freezing. In one memorable moment at the conference, I had lost my gloves and my hands were freezing. A stranger whom I had met only minutes ago kindly gave me an extra pair. This generous act reminded me that, even as we think about the global impacts of AI and climate change, simple human kindness touches people's hearts and reminds us that the ultimate purpose of our work is to help people.
Keep learning! Andrew
P.S. Check out our new short course on “Automated Testing for LLMOps,” taught by CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber! This course teaches how you can adapt key ideas from continuous integration (CI), a pillar of efficient software engineering, to building applications based on large language models (LLMs). Tweaking an LLM-based app can have unexpected side effects, and having automated testing as part of your approach to LLMOps (LLM Operations) helps avoid these problems. CI is especially important for AI applications given the iterative nature of AI development, which often involves many incremental changes. Please sign up here.
NewsEarly Detection for Pancreatic CancerA neural network detected early signs of pancreatic cancer more effectively than doctors who used the usual risk-assessment criteria. What’s new: Researchers at MIT and oncologists at Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston built a model that analyzed existing medical records to predict the risk that an individual will develop the most common form of pancreatic cancer. The model outperformed commonly used genetic tests.
Results: PrismNN identified as high-risk 35.9 percent of patients who went on to develop PDAC, with a false-positive rate of 4.7 percent. In comparison, the genetic criteria typically used to identify patients for pancreatic cancer screening flags 10 percent of patients who go on to develop PDAC. The model performed similarly across age, race, gender, and location, although some groups (particularly Asian and Native American patients) were underrepresented in its training data. Behind the news: AI shows promise in detecting various forms of cancer. In a randomized, controlled trial last year, a neural network recognized breast tumors in mammograms at a rate comparable to human radiologists. In 2022, an algorithm successfully identified tumors in lymph node biopsies. Why it matters: Cancer of the pancreas is one of the deadliest. Only 11 percent of patients survive for 5 years after diagnosis. Most cases aren’t diagnosed until the disease has reached an advanced stage. Models that can spot early cases could boost the survival rate significantly. We’re thinking: The fact that this study required no additional testing is remarkable and means the authors’ method could be deployed cheaply. However, the results were based on patients who had already been diagnosed with cancer. It remains for other teams to replicate them with patients who have not received a diagnosis, perhaps followed by a randomized, controlled clinical trial.
AI Creates Jobs, Study SuggestsEuropeans are keeping their jobs even as AI does an increasing amount of work. What’s new: Researchers at the European Central Bank found that employment in occupations affected by AI rose over nearly a decade. How it works: The authors considered jobs that were found to be affected by AI over the past decade according to two studies. As a control group, they considered jobs affected by software generally (“recording, storing, and producing information, and executing programs, logic, and rules”), as detailed in one of the studies. They measured changes in employment and wages in those jobs based on a survey of workers in 16 European countries between 2011 and 2019. Results: The researchers found that exposure to AI was associated with greater employment for some workers and had little effect on wages.
Behind the news: Other studies suggest that automation in general and AI technology in particular may benefit the workforce as a whole.
Yes, but: It may be too soon to get a clear view of AI’s impact on employment, the authors point out. The data that underlies every study to date ends in 2019, predating ChatGPT and the present wave of generative AI. Furthermore, the impact of AI in European countries varies with their individual economic conditions (for instance, Greece tends to lose more jobs than Germany). Why it matters: Many employees fear that AI — and generative AI in particular — will take their jobs. Around the world, the public is nervous about the technology’s potential impact on employment. Follow-up studies using more recent data could turn these fears into more realistic — and more productive — appraisals. We’re thinking: AI is likely to take some jobs. We feel deeply for workers whose livelihoods are affected, and society has a responsibility to create a safety net to help them. To date, at least, the impact has been less than many observers feared. One reason may be that jobs are made up of many tasks, and AI automates tasks rather than jobs. In many jobs, AI can automate a subset of the work while the jobs continue to be filled by humans, who may earn a higher wage if AI helps them be more productive.
A MESSAGE FROM DEEPLEARNING.AIAutomated testing of applications based on large language models can save significant development time and cost. In this course, you’ll learn to build a continuous-integration pipeline to evaluate LLM-based apps at every change and fix bugs early for efficient, cost-effective development. Enroll for free
Sovereign AIGovernments want access to AI chips and software built in their own countries, and they are shelling out billions of dollars to make it happen.
Behind the news: Even as governments move toward AI independence, many are attempting to influence international politics and trade to bolster their positions.
Why it matters: AI has emerged as an important arena for international competition, reshaping global society and economics, generating economic growth, and affecting national security. For engineers, the competition means that governments are competing to attract talent and investment, but they’re also less inclined to share technology across borders.
Learning the Language of GeometryMachine learning algorithms often struggle with geometry. A language model learned to prove relatively difficult theorems. What's new: Trieu Trinh, Yuhuai Wu, Quoc Le, and colleagues at Google and New York University proposed AlphaGeometry, a system that can prove geometry theorems almost as well as the most accomplished high school students. The authors focused on non-combinatorial Euclidean plane geometry. How it works: AlphaGeometry has two components. (i) Given a geometrical premise and an unproven proposition, an off-the-shelf geometric proof finder derived statements that followed from the premise. The authors modified the proof finder to deduce proofs from not only geometric concepts but also algebraic concepts such as ratios, angles, and distances. (ii) A transformer learned to read and write proofs in the proof finder’s specialized language.
Results: The authors tested AlphaGeometry on 30 problems posed by the International Mathematical Olympiad, an annual competition for high school students. Comparing that score to human performance isn’t so straightforward because human competitors can receive partial credit. Human gold medalists since 2000 solved 25.9 problems correctly, silver medalists solved 22.9 problems, and bronze medalists solved 19.3 problems. The previous state-of-the-art approach solved 10 problems, and the modified proof finder solved 14 problems. In one instance, the system identified an unused premise and found a more generalized proof than required, effectively solving many similar problems at once. Why it matters: Existing AI systems can juggle symbols and follow simple rules of deduction, but they struggle with steps that human mathematicians represent visually by, say, drawing a diagram. It’s possible to make up this deficit by (i) alternating between a large language model (LLM) and a proof finder, (ii) combining geometric and algebraic reasoning, and (ii) training the LLM on a large data set. The result is a breakthrough for geometric problem solving. We're thinking: In 1993, the teenaged Andrew Ng represented Singapore in the International Mathematics Olympiad, where he won a silver medal. AI’s recent progress in solving hard problems is a sine of the times!
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