AI explosion

Photo: Marie Hubert Psaila/Abaca Press via Reuters

The enormity of the AI revolution is becoming clearer by the day — with leading thinkers now debating whether it’s bigger than the invention of the printing press or the splitting of the atom.

• Why it matters: Bill Gates, who knows a thing or two about new eras, wrote this week that artificial intelligence — and the sudden proliferation of chatbots — “is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet.”

Here’s a snapshot of the real-time reaction to this tectonic shift, synthesized by Axios tech managing editor Scott Rosenberg:

1. This is big — therefore we need to be first: Companies seeking growth, nations seeking power, individuals seeking advancement — everyone in this camp aims to floor the pedal on AI to try to win.
2. This is big — therefore we need to be careful: Advocates of the “go slow and regulate” stance argue that society made a ton of mistakes with social media — and is about to repeat them with AI.
3. This is so big it poses an existential risk to humanity: A subset of the “go slow and regulate” camp sees our AI moment as a “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”-style disaster in the making — with a potent new technology that we don’t understand on the verge of taking an irreversible leap that imperils us all.
4. This is hype: These skeptics downplay the significance of recent AI advances — and believe ChatGPT and its descendants will hit a wall before they can learn to sort fact from fiction.

The N.Y. Times’ Tom Friedman — in a column called “Our New Promethean Moment” (subscription) — wrote that he could barely sleep after getting a demo of GPT-4, the advanced new version of ChatGPT:

• We’re entering “one of those moments in history when certain new tools, ways of thinking or energy sources are introduced that are such a departure and advance on what existed before that … you have to change everything …
• “[H]ow you create, how you compete, how you collaborate, how you work, how you learn, how you govern and, yes, how you cheat, commit crimes and fight wars.”

Friedman’s analogies: “invention of the printing press, the scientific revolution, the agricultural revolution combined with the industrial revolution, the nuclear power revolution, personal computing and the internet and … now this moment.”