This week in AI news, OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora has caught the attention of Hollywood, potentially threatening careers in the film industry as production companies show interest in the technology. According to a report, the integration of AI into business could result in as many as 8 million job losses in the UK. Meanwhile, the UN has called for secure and equitable access to AI systems for developing countries, though unity among member states remains uncertain.
In a controversial development, AI facial recognition technology was used by police to arrest 17 individuals in London, raising ethical questions about the justification of its use. Researchers have also proposed building an interconnected “Collective AI” or a “hive mind”, where AI models share knowledge. Despite the comparison to the Borg collective from Star Trek, Stability AI’s former CEO Emad Mostaque intends to develop a ‘decentralized AI’, aiming to reduce the concentration of power over AI.
In the political sphere, Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake has fallen victim to a non-consensual deep fake video, highlighting the threat of AI in politics and the difficulty in spotting deep fakes. On a positive note, the UK’s National Health Service is utilizing an AI tool called ‘Mia’ to spot overlooked cases of cancer, potentially saving lives. Furthermore, an AI tool is being developed to create ‘digital twins’ based on individual health records for improved medical forecasting.
Other notable AI happenings include Amazon’s $2.75b investment in AI startup Anthropic, Intel’s confirmation that Microsoft’s Copilot AI will soon run locally on PCs, and startup Databricks’ release of the powerful open-source LLM DBRX. OpenAI has provided access to Sora to certain creatives, resulting in new video content. Lastly, Claude 3 Opus has beaten GPT-4 to the top of the Chatbot Arena list.
With the swift development of AI models like Sora, the film industry may be disrupted sooner than expected. The idea of AI models learning and optimizing in a “hive mind”, however enjoyable or unsettling it may be, seems close to reality. The rapid advances in AI technology make efforts to predict the future seem foolhardy, but it is almost certain to continue surprising us.
