Google founder AGI is within reach
How AI will change companies
US cities most at risk from AI
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Google founder AGI is within reach
On Wednesday, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said the company could lead the industry in artificial general intelligence — when machines match or become smarter than humans — if employees worked harder. “I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Google’s lineup of A.I. models and apps.
Still, the note highlighted Mr. Brin’s belief that A.G.I. — a long-sought goal in computing — could be within reach. And it shed more light on how he believes Google could achieve that technological leap. “Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to A.G.I. is afoot,” he wrote. “I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.” He highlighted the need for Google’s employees to use more of its A.I. for coding, saying the A.I.’s improving itself would lead to A.G.I. He also called on employees working on Gemini to be “the most efficient coders and A.I. scientists in the world by using our own A.I.” More companies have ordered employees back to the office full time to improve productivity. In September, Amazon said its corporate employees must return to the office five days a week starting in 2025. AT&T, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have also reversed hybrid-work policies.
Mr. Brin returned to Google after ChatGPT’s launch, The Times has reported, to help the company navigate the difficult moment when it lost its advantage in A.I. (Google had developed numerous technologies that make chatbots like ChatGPT adept at writing things like poetry, code and travel plans.) Ever since, he has spent a lot of time with the company’s A.I. specialists in its Google DeepMind division tasked with developing A.I., sometimes personally filing code requests. In the two years since Mr. Brin returned, Google has reorganized its business, rebranded its A.I. and rolled out the technology across its popular apps — all in an effort to win the race against OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and others....
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How AI will change companies
As intelligence becomes cheaper and faster, the basic assumption underpinning our institutions — that human insight is scarce and expensive — no longer holds. When you can effectively consult a dozen experts anytime you like, it changes how companies organize, how we innovate and how each of us approaches learning and decision-making. The question facing individuals and organizations alike is: What will you do when intelligence itself is suddenly ubiquitous and practically free?
This isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed a revolutionary drop in the cost and distribution of knowledge. When the printing press emerged in the mid-15th century, it slashed the expense of disseminating written material. Before printing, texts were painstakingly reproduced by hand, often by monastic scribes who were themselves highly trained specialists. Once this bottleneck disappeared, Europe underwent sweeping transformations: The Protestant Reformation reshaped religion, literacy rates soared (paving the way for elementary schooling) and scientific inquiry flourished through printed treatises. The biggest beneficiaries of these shifts were the commercially minded nations of Holland and England, which enjoyed Golden Ages — and in England’s case, centuries of global leadership.
The Internet extended this trend by dramatically reducing the cost of accessing reliable information. When I was a child, researching a new topic meant walking to the local library with a list of subjects, an effort that could consume half a day. Back then, knowledge wasn’t cheap or easily accessible. Today, artificial intelligence is providing the next step in the millennia-old process of lowering the costs of intelligence. That may define the next chapter of our economic and intellectual evolution. The six months since o1’s release have seen enormous progress. The most recent AI trend — one that will likely still be relevant when you read this — involves turning these reasoning models into autonomous research assistants. These systems are remarkable.
Yet when I talk to the bosses of big firms, I generally see them using AI in trivial areas, far from the tough questions I put in front of my AIs. The starting point is often in automating customer service to reduce costs. Some 86% of Salesforce’s 36,000 weekly customer support inquiries are answered by AI agents, its CEO said in December. Klarna, a Swedish fintech leader, handles two-thirds of its customer support chats using AI, contributing $40 million in profit from adoption. But very few companies will actually move the dial by shaving 10% off customer service expenses. No great company has been built simply by cutting costs. Most companies start small with AI, automating $50/hour tasks like customer service chats — useful, but hardly transformative. Yet these same AI platforms can tackle $5,000/hour challenges: R&D, strategic planning or specialized consulting. Why aren’t more companies using them to those ends? At one level, it’s just hard to imagine that the things you’ve delegated to your senior folks or your best people could be done or partly done by a machine. “High-value tasks” are high-value precisely because you can’t find enough people to do them.…
Read on Bloomberg
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US cities most at risk from AI
Silicon Valley, the place that did more than any other to pioneer artificial intelligence, is the most exposed to its ability to automate work. That’s according to an analysis by researchers at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, which matched the tasks that OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 could do with the jobs that are most common in different US cities.
The result is a sharp departure from previous rounds of automation. Whereas technologies like robotic automation came for middle-class jobs — and manufacturing cities such as Detroit — generative AI is best at the white-collar work that’s highly paid and most common in “superstar” cities like San Francisco and Washington, DC. The Brookings analysis is of the US, but the same logic would apply anywhere: The more a city’s economy is oriented around white-collar knowledge work, the more exposed it is to AI.
“Exposure” doesn’t necessarily mean automation, stressed Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings and one of the study’s authors. It could also mean productivity gains. A separate study, released in February by the AI firm Anthropic, found that Anthropic’s chatbot Claude directly completed a task in 43% of its conversations, whereas it was asked to collaborate with a human in 57% of them. “The big question is whether AI is a substitute [for human work] or a complement,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford not involved in either study. “If it’s a substitute, then the Bay Area and Northeast Corridor will see massive job churn, and potentially job loss.” In that scenario, AI would be “like a China Shock for the 21st century,” he said.
On the other hand, “If it’s a complement, then these areas could boom,” Bloom said, citing the example of AI making coders more productive and consequently increasing their employment. Muro said he and his colleagues struggled when it came to the question of what to do about AI’s encroachment. In the era of industrial automation, the typical advice was to “remain human, be creative, prize learning,” he said. But in the face of AI’s flexibility, emotional intelligence and creativity, “those sound a little bit trite right now.”
AI will also test our theories of what superstar cities really do economically. Are they just collections of individuals with skills that happen to be highly compensated? Or are these cities special engines of innovation and flexibility? If it’s the former, the labor markets in San Francisco and San Jose could be in trouble. If it’s the latter, they could be the cities that not only invent modern AI but figure out how to use it....
Enjoy! SBalley Team