Robert Hummel
Chief Scientist, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies
What are we going to do about Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
- The US is in a competition with China for AI “dominance”.
- Companies are pouring billions of dollars into developing AI applications;
- Investors have trillions of dollars of assets in companies producing hardware that supports generative AI;
- Deepfakes have the potential to upend politics, marketing, and individual legacies;
- Artists and others are suing for copyright infringement over AI systems scraping their data; and
- Some worry that after the “singularity,” AI systems will take over and dominate humans!
What a mess! Yet, many believe that AI and its applications, using tools such as large language models (LLMs), are the economic engine for businesses of the future. Applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT® and Dall-E® generate billions in revenue, but still lose money due to the immense expense required to create the models.
The government is extremely interested in leveraging AI capabilities and using LLMs. There is a tendency, however, to think that AI offers an alternative to using human intelligence. In actuality, the government’s use of AI technology will still require human input and labor.