Over the past year, we’ve seen a full hype cycle of hysteria and discourse surrounding generative AI. It almost seems difficult to think back to a time when no one had used ChatGPT. We are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, and technology is moving rapidly. Better performing and more capable models are being released at a stunning rate, and with the growing presence of multimodal AI, can we expect another whirlwind year that vastly changes the state of play within AI again? Who might be able to provide insight into what is to come in 2024?

Craig S. Smith is an American journalist, former executive of The New York Times, and host of the podcast Eye on AI. Until January 2000, he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, most notably covering the rise of the religious movement Falun Gong in China. He has reported for the Times from more than 40 countries and has covered several conflicts, including the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the 2003 war in Iraq, and the 2006 Israeli-Lebanese war. He retired from the Times in 2018 and now writes about artificial intelligence for the Times and other publications. He was a special Government employee for the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence until the commission's end in October 2021. 

In the episode, Richie and Craig explore the 2023 advancements in generative AI, such as GPT-4, and the evolving roles of companies like Anthropic and Meta, practical AI applications for research and image generation, challenges in large language models, the promising future of world models and AI agents, the societal impacts of AI, the issue of misinformation, computational constraints, and the importance of AI literacy in the job market, the transformative potential of AI in various sectors and much more. 

Links Mentioned in the Show:

• Eye on AI
• Wayve
• Anthropic
• Cohere
• Midjourney
• Yann Lecun