Microsoft and OpenAI Innovators Weigh in on AI’s Future

The pace of developing and releasing new artificial intelligence models is seemingly accelerating as more and more applications pop up every day. What was once limited to an obscure pocket of tech researchers has become mainstream with massive companies, like Microsoft and OpenAI, investing heavily in AI’s future.

Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Ashley Llorens, says current AI models can now handle very difficult tasks almost automatically. Reasoning skills and information processing have reached unprecedented levels.

“What we’ve got now is we’ve got AI that can reason better, that can perceive the environment in more sophisticated ways,” Llorens told Yahoo! Finance. “And so what that’s going to mean is that we’ll be able to delegate a more sophisticated set of tasks to the AI to complete on our behalf.”

Multimodal models, which can interpret and create outputs using text, images, or videos, will be more prevalent in the near future. One example includes Microsoft’s Copilot Vision, a Copilot for Windows feature. Among other things, the app will reportedly be able to understand a webpage and answer any user questions about it.

Right now, artificial intelligence data centers consume a lot of energy to function. Llorens predicts that will change through innovation and hardware improvements, with servers eventually becoming more efficient and eco-friendly.

AI Will Be ‘Used for Everything’

Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI, also has predictions for artificial intelligence. Altman shares Llorens’ opinion that the technology will be able to accomplish very difficult tasks and will likely utilize various other tools to do them.

At the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York City, Altman said the advancement of AI’s “superintelligence” will not have much of an impact at first. Yet, ultimately, it will “be more intense than people think,” implying there may be a significant job disruption coming.

“There will be shockingly capable [AI] models, widely available, used for everything,” he stated. 

When asked about the potential dangers of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Altman defended the chatbot. For now, ChatGPT is “acceptably safe and acceptably robust” by most users’ standards, noted Altman. However, there are many who fear the unrestrained growth of AI technology will be a risk to humanity and encourage government intervention before it’s too late.

Altman seems to agree. If AI ever exceeds the intelligence of humans, “we are going to have to have some faith in our governments,” he noted. Altman trustingly assumes world governments will communicate and step up to any challenges created by AI.