After a year of fast and furious development of generative AI, the industry is at a crossroads. The technology is poised to deliver unprecedented productivity growth but may be hamstrung by limits to the technology as well as guardrails for its usage. That’s the word from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), which just released the 2024 edition of its annual AI Index. Interestingly, while AI continues to become mainstream, the study’s authors observe that the investment wave and the need for AI development skills has waned. There appear to be some doses of reality coursing through the business world — AI is a powerful tool, but it’s nowhere near the point at which it can seamlessly take on the bulk of work. “AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all,” the report’s authors state. “AI has “surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning, and planning.” There’s no question that AI has become smarter and more powerful over the past 12 months. At the same time, the costs of building and maintaining large language models (LLMs) has increased astronomically, In addition, the industry still lacks standards for responsible AI best practices. The number of new large language models released worldwide in 2023 doubled over the previous year, the report states. “Two-thirds were open-source, but the highest-performing models came from industry players with closed systems.
Full story : Artificial Intelligence 2024: Smarter But More Expensive.
