On June 17, 2020, Steve Omohundro spoke about “Platform AI, Personal AI, and Global AI” to The Hive’s excellent “Think Tank” group:
Here’s the video of the talk:
and the abstract:
Simple artificial intelligence has transformed the world economy over the past 15 years. In 2004, the 5 largest companies were GE, Exxon, Microsoft, Pfizer, and Citigroup. By 2019, they were Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook, all based on the powerful “AI Platform Model”. These companies use simple AI-based search, recommendation, matchmaking, ad serving, and malicious content filtering to create new channels between producers and consumers. Today’s most valuable startup is ByteDance (recently valued at $140 billion) whose TikTok platform is driven by 3 simple AI technologies.
As AI becomes more powerful, these basic channels will expand into a wide array of new forms of business and social interaction. We argue that every person will have a trusted “Personal AI” that promotes their interests and filters content and interactions not aligned with their values. At a large scale, “Global AI” will improve governance through increasingly detailed world simulations to manage global challenges like pandemics, global warming, financial crises, etc. New social mechanisms like “quadratic voting” and “semantic voting” will enable society to better meet citizen’s needs. AI will help people filter false and manipulative content which will shift the incentives for advertisers and news sources. The impact of this “Multi-Scale AI” is likely to be immense. We describe recent ideas from the science of complex systems that help us to analyze and manage it.
SPEAKER:
Steve Omohundro has done fundamental research in AI for the past 35 years. He has a PhD in physics, was an AI professor at the University of Illinois, was a scientist at several research labs and worked with many startups. He is the Chief Scientist at AIBrain, works with Facebook on bringing advanced technologies to ad serving, and founded Possibility Research to help ensure that AI will be beneficial for humanity. He co-founded one of the first complex systems institutes, designed the first data-parallel programming language, invented manifold learning, co-developed the first image recommender system, co-developed the first attention-driven neural nets, co-built the first lip reading system, and developed many other learning algorithms. His work on AI’s social impact was featured in the book “Our Final Invention” and he appears in the recent Universal Pictures documentary “We Need to Talk About AI”.
Steve Omohundro 