Media
Language models that can search the web hold promise -- but also raise concerns
Did you miss a session at the Data Summit? Language models -- AI systems that can be prompted to write essays and emails, answer questions, and more -- remain flawed in many ways. Because they "learn" to write from examples on the web, including problematic social media posts, they're prone to generating misinformation, conspiracy theories, and racist, sexist, or otherwise toxic language. Another major limitation of many of today's language models is that they're "stuck in time," in a sense. Because they're trained once on a large collection of text from the web, their knowledge of the world -- which they gain from that collection -- can quickly become outdated depending on when they were deployed.
How machine learning is impacting the world
Society and science-fiction writers have long been enamored with the concept of Artificial Intelligence. While general Artificial Intelligence has yet to be achieved, there have been significant innovations in AI. Machine Learning and predictive analytics, which are subsets of AI, have been used in a diverse range of tasks ranging from healthcare to banking. It might seem like AI is out of reach for many businesses and their applications, but that is not true. Software developers like Koombea build and implement Machine Learning algorithms to improve software performance.