The Accelerating Pace of AI Progress

If you want to stay on top of the breathtaking advances happening in artificial intelligence, you need look no further than the 2022 State of AI Report from Anthropic and the YouTube channel that covered it in detail. This report and analysis provides incisive insight into the latest research and developments across modalities from language to robotics.

In the video overview, the narrator provides highlights from the report as well as breaking developments that have occurred just in the past few days and weeks. It's a fascinating testament to just how fast this field is moving.

One area not covered in Anthropic's report is the progress in decoding thoughts and images directly from brain activity, in potentially real-time. The analysis describes new research from Meta on decoding images from brain activity, though it's still far from perfect. Other efforts using fMRI can produce much clearer images, but not in real time. This line of research opens up new modalities like directly accessing thoughts and imagination.

When it comes to large language models like GPT-3, the basics are skipped over, having been extensively explored already by this channel. The analysis highlights recent work on smaller models like Anthropic's Claude which reach parity with GPT-3 despite being over 10x smaller. This illustrates the potential to imitate and replicate the capabilities of large proprietary models.

The report also doesn't cover recent work like Anthropic's Eureka, which iterating improves at manipulating a simulated physics environment through natural language interaction alone. This demonstrates what may be a crucial capability - self-improvement through open-ended learning. Eureka outperformed human-crafted rewards on 83% of tasks, showing the power of this approach.

A key observation made is that we're seeing rapid improvements across modalities fuel each other. Better language models boost vision, which in turn enhances language, in a virtuous cycle. ALL the capabilities are getting better, faster.

Beyond Eureka, other notable recent work includes using actual robotics data to improve performance on pure language tasks. The more modalities incorporated, the faster the wheel of improvement spins. We may be approaching integrated multi-modal models that take this phenomenon to the next level.

On the robotics front, the analysis covers the first-ever victory for an AI system in a competitive sport - drone racing. The autonomous drones outpaced human pilots easily with superhuman consistency and tight maneuvering. And China has approved fully autonomous taxi flights, though public trust still needs to be established.

In music, AI rappers are reaching impressive creative heights, as demonstrated by examples generated by SO-AI. We're nearing a point where AI could consistently out-compete humans across musical genres.

The overview notes standalone medical question answering systems that can now outdo most human doctors, powered by models like Anthropic's Med-PaLM. With techniques like chain of thought prompting and consistency, these scores could climb even higher. AI is being rapidly adopted across medicine.

In mathematics, AI systems are even tackling and solving complex International Math Olympiad problems previously thought intractable, thanks to algorithmic innovations from Google DeepMind's AlphaTensor. Truly no field is safe from accelerating AI progress.

Upstarts like INB are now training Foundation Models on hundreds of cutting-edge H100 GPUs in pursuit of reasoning capabilities beyond any current system. Combined with the manual dexterity shown by Eureka, we are approaching a point where questioning what AI cannot do may be more appropriate than what it can do.

The analysis highlights the escalating AI chip wars, with export bans forcing Chinese companies to innovate rapidly on homegrown hardware. And we see tech giants like Microsoft and Google shield users from legal risk, taking on the copyright debate brewing around AI-generated content head on.

Disturbingly, autonomous attack drones are already deployed in conflict zones, representing a ethical Pandora's box. With no international consensus or treaties around autonomous weapons, tech development again races ahead of any regulatory framework.

Despite criticizing some predictions in Anthropic's report as too conservative, the video ends with its own prediction - that in the next year, we'll see a model that breaks benchmarks across at least 4 distinct modalities simultaneously.

If this analysis is any indicator, we are truly in the midst of an AI Cambrian explosion. Modalities are crossing over and progressing in leaps and bounds, compounded by advances across fields. 2023 promises to be one of the most significant years to date in this accelerating journey.

The pace can seem dizzying. But insightful overviews like this video provide the synthesis we need to track and understand this seismic shift happening before our eyes. If you care about where technology is taking us, you need to keep an eye trained on AI progress across all its facets. Because if we thought 2022 was transformative, the light speed innovation coming in 2023 will rewrite the rules and possibilities yet again.