TIME Magazine Asia TIME Artificial Intelligence

To create is human. For the past 300,000 years we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing before. Now we have company. While you’re reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. They’re writing pitch decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blueprints, and providing health advice. Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive impact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on social media. But generative AI, a category of system that can be prompted to create wholly novel content, is much newer. This shift marks the most important technological breakthrough since social media. Generative AI…

Every day there’s a new headline about AI surprising us: passing the LSAT, winning an art contest, declaring undying love. But for Adrienne Mayor, historian of ancient science and author of Gods and Robots, our current fascination with artificial intelligence is part of a multimillennia-long human drive to get better, smarter, faster, and stronger. “Human enhancement technologies go all the way back to antiquity,” she tells TIME. We’ve come to rely on glasses, hearing aids, and artificial limbs, but when AI is fully realized, it will dramatically exceed today’s human limits, allowing us to fully transcend them. Already, the new slate of generative AI tools promises to make every human more productive, able to learn faster and communicate better—maybe even be a little more creative. The best is yet to come. In…

DEMIS HASSABIS CEO and Co-Founder, Google DeepMind When Demis Hassabis was a young man, he helped design Theme Park, a computer game that gave the player a God’s-eye view of a sprawling fairground business. Ever since then, Hassabis, who leads Google DeepMind, one of the top AI labs, has been trying to attain a God’s-eye view of the world. Google DeepMind is developing a large AI model called Gemini, which Hassabis has hinted might be able to outperform OpenAI’s GPT-4. (The model, which at press time was rumored to be out in December, will be “multimodal:” meaning it is trained on—and can input and output—not just text but other media, like images.) Will Gemini be a bigger version of what has come before, or is there something architecturally different about the way it is…

THE CATASTROPHISTS GEOFFREY HINTON Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto Over the course of February 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the most influential AI researchers of the past 50 years, had a “slow eureka moment.” Hinton has spent his career trying to build AI systems that model the human brain, mostly in academia before joining Google in 2013. He had always believed that the brain was better than the machines that he and others were building, and that by making them more like the brain, they would improve. But early in 2023, he realized “the digital intelligence we’ve got now may be better than the brain already. It’s just not scaled up quite as big.” Developers around the world are currently racing to build the biggest AI systems that they can. Given the current rate at…

‘AI DOESN’T CARE ABOUT TRUTH, IT CARES ABOUT THE PATTERNS IT’S FED. IF THOSE PATTERNS ARE FAULTY, THEY’LL BE REPRODUCED.’—Damien P. Williams You’re hiring an assistant or considering candidates for a grant, and you’d like to make the best choice possible, free of emotion or any hidden bias you might have—so you turn to AI for help. But not so fast! Generative AI, trained on the massive flow of human language and culture across the internet, has already absorbed our biases, including the unconscious ones. And while developers are working to purge racism, sexism, and disdain for the disabled from their language models, they have a lot of work ahead, especially when it comes to more nuanced forms of discrimination we cannot always perceive. In the Q&A that follows, Pamela Weintraub…

Before last year, Jana Soldicic’s understanding of artificial intelligence was mostly limited to what she’d read on the pages of science fiction novels. But in the fall, after getting the chance to use the technology in real life as she played around with the generative AI tools ChatGPT and DALL·E, she got more curious. “I really wanted to know what was behind it. I knew it couldn’t be magic,” Soldicic said. She searched on her computer and found Elements of AI, a self-paced, online course created by MinnaLearn and the University of Helsinki that provides an introduction to artificial intelligence designed for people without a background in technology. Soldicic was surprised by how much she enjoyed the course. “I got a little bit addicted to it,” she says. “It gave me a basic…