It is of utmost importance to keep up with the changing trends in AI technology and analyze them periodically as best as one can. The AI Index, from the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, recently worked with experts from academia and private industry to put out a 386-page report that was a bid to summarize the industry, resulting in the AI index. This report includes “new analysis on foundation models, including their geopolitics and training costs, the environmental impact of AI systems, K-12 AI education, and public opinion trends in AI,” essentially making it a comprehensive representation of modern AI.
In this report, a few main takeaways can be summarised into bullets as follows: AI is expanding, AI bias and toxicity are needing to be tackled, AI development is becoming more expensive, and AI incidents and controversies are increasing. These points might seem simple and high-level, but if you delve deeper into the report, you’ll find that the nuances of the burgeoning field are explored through a technical AI ethics chapter. In this chapter, instructions tuning is proposed as a way to tackle the bias and toxicity problem that machine learning models encompass, with added detail on the growing rise of AI incidents and controversies, and the difficulties in making models more fair and unbiased.
What is most found in the report is that fact-checking is proving to be a difficult challenge for AI. Despite the seeming structured nature of fact-checking, it has been found that AI is particularly bad at evaluating accuracy and that false information is likely to spread through it. A number of studies intend to find ways to improve this shortcoming and the number of submissions at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, as well as the heightened attention at NeurIPS, suggests a positive outlook.
To conclude, the report written by the AI Index is a comprehensive look at the current state of affairs in AI technology and should be taken a look at, to keep up with the everchanging field. Rather than having tunnel vision, this report invites readers to absorb the information and make predictions that are not only valuable but also realistic. The Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit organization founded by Turing Award-winning computer scientist Fei-Fei Li and Stanford AI expert John Etchemendy and their work with experts means the report is timely, succinct and all-encompassing.
