Welcome to The Week in Generative AI, a weekly column for marketers from Quad Insights that quickly sums up need-to-know developments surrounding this rapidly evolving technology.
Frontier Model Forum to promote responsible AI development
On Wednesday, four of the leading companies in the artificial intelligence space announced the formation of a new industry body to promote the safe and responsible development of advanced AI models.
The Frontier Model Forum is a self-regulating body that will be made up of representatives from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic. The group’s goals include developing best practices for the development of advanced AI models and mitigating potential risks.
The Guardian’s Dan Milmo interviewed Dr Andrew Rogoyski of the University of Surrey’s Institute for People-Centred AI, who sounds skeptical of this sort of self-policing approach. “I have grave concerns that governments have ceded leadership in AI to the private sector, probably irrecoverably,” he said. “It’s such a powerful technology, with great potential for good and ill, that it needs independent oversight that will represent people, economies and societies which will be impacted by AI in the future.”
Related coverage:
- “Google, Microsoft form new A.I. group to develop safety standards ahead of policymakers” (CNBC)
- “The problem with Big Tech’s voluntary AI safety commitments” (Tech Brew)
- Earlier: “The world needs a global AI observatory — here’s why” (MIT Sloan)
OpenAI is testing a powerful new image generator
OpenAI is testing a new image generator that could leave its competition in the dust. The tool was leaked to YouTuber MattVidPro, who posted a video of it in action, Decrypt’s Jose Antonio Lanz reports. “Don’t expect to try it out anytime soon, however,” Lanz writes. “Access is extremely limited.”
The video shows the tool generating high-quality images from text descriptions. For example, MattVidPro asks the tool to generate an image of “a cat sitting on a couch watching TV,” and the tool produces an image that is indistinguishable from a real photo.
The tool is reportedly based on an improved version of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 model. Lanz pulls out many examples from the 22-minute video and concludes that “the consistent quality shown in the samples is a leap forward. … The company may reveal more on its progress later this year, especially if the field of image recognition and generation helps improve the robustness of its star product: a multimodal GPT-4 capable of understanding text, images, and drafts in one prompt.”
Related coverage:
- “Beyond OpenAI: Sam Altman The Investor Takes Center Stage” (Crunchbase)
- “OpenAI Hires Former Microsoft Lawyer to Oversee Publisher Negotiations” (The Information)
- “Researchers Poke Holes in Safety Controls of ChatGPT and Other Chatbots” (The New York Times)
- “Cleaning Up ChatGPT Takes Heavy Toll on Human Workers” (The Wall Street Journal)
- “OpenAI can’t tell if something was written by AI after all” (The Verge)
- “Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?” (The Atlantic)
Amazon AI wants to help physicians with their paperwork
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new AI-enhanced tool called AWS HealthScribe that automatically generates transcripts and summaries of patient visits. CNBC’s Ashley Capoot writes that “the service aims to save health-care workers time using AI-generated transcripts and summaries of patient visits, which can then be entered into the electronic health record system.”
Over at TechCrunch, Kyle Wiggers has some pressing questions: “So is HealthScribe consistent? Can it be trusted, particularly when it comes to deciding whether to label a part of a discussion as ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’ or identifying medications? And can it handle the wide array of different accents and vernaculars that patients and providers might use?”
His current answer: “The jury’s out on all that.”
Related coverage:
- “This Health AI Startup Aims To Keep Doctors Up To Date On The Latest Science” (Forbes)
- “General Catalyst-backed Hippocratic AI nabs $15M” (Modern Healthcare)
Further reading
- “The Generative AI Battle Has a Fundamental Flaw” (Wired)
- “Google points to many ways it can win in A.I. even as online ad market shows cracks” (Fortune)
- “Meta’s Open Source Llama Upsets the AI Horse Race” (Wired)
- “Can AI Replace Humans? We Went to the Fast-Food Drive-Through to Find Out” (The Wall Street Journal)
- “Studios Quietly Go on Hiring Spree for AI Specialist Jobs Amid Picket Line Anxiety” (The Hollywood Reporter)
- “Generative AI and the future of work in America” (McKinsey Global Institute)
- “More than 70% of companies are experimenting with generative AI, but few are willing to commit more spending” (VentureBeat)
- “Generative AI To Unleash Roaring ’20s Productivity Boom And Long S&P 500 Bull Market” (Investor’s Business Daily)
Thanks for following along as we cover the generative AI beat. See you next week.
Previously: “The Week in Generative AI: July 21, 2023 edition”
