Artificial intelligence seems predestined to become a bigger part of our lives. To what extent is the A.I. push being led by Sam Altman and the OpenAI team a cause for concern? If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence--and you'll be supporting the work we do here on What Next TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.

Their work, which is yet to be peer reviewed, shows that while training massive AI models is incredibly energy intensive, it's only one part of the puzzle. Most of their carbon footprint comes from their actual use. The study is the first time researchers have calculated the carbon emissions caused by using an AI model for different tasks, says Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher at Hugging Face who led the work. She hopes understanding these emissions could help us make informed decisions about how to use AI in a more planet-friendly way. Luccioni and her team looked at the emissions associated with 10 popular AI tasks on the Hugging Face platform, such as question answering, text generation, image classification, captioning, and image generation.

Radiologists produce unstructured data that could be valuable for clinical care when consumed by information systems. However, variability in style limits usage. Study compares performance of system using domain-adapted language model (RadLing) and general-purpose large language model (GPT-4) in extracting common data elements (CDE) from thoracic radiology reports. Three radiologists annotated a retrospective dataset of 1300 thoracic reports (900 training, 400 test) and mapped to 21 pre-selected relevant CDEs. RadLing was used to generate embeddings for sentences and identify CDEs using cosine-similarity, which were mapped to values using light-weight mapper. GPT-4 system used OpenAI's general-purpose embeddings to identify relevant CDEs and used GPT-4 to map to values. The output CDE:value pairs were compared to the reference standard; an identical match was considered true positive. Precision (positive predictive value) was 96% (2700/2824) for RadLing and 99% (2034/2047) for GPT-4. Recall (sensitivity) was 94% (2700/2876) for RadLing and 70% (2034/2887) for GPT-4; the difference was statistically significant (P<.001). RadLing's domain-adapted embeddings were more sensitive in CDE identification (95% vs 71%) and its light-weight mapper had comparable precision in value assignment (95.4% vs 95.0%). RadLing system exhibited higher performance than GPT-4 system in extracting CDEs from radiology reports. RadLing system's domain-adapted embeddings outperform general-purpose embeddings from OpenAI in CDE identification and its light-weight value mapper achieves comparable precision to large GPT-4. RadLing system offers operational advantages including local deployment and reduced runtime costs. Domain-adapted RadLing system surpasses GPT-4 system in extracting common data elements from radiology reports, while providing benefits of local deployment and lower costs.

Innovative foundation models, such as GPT-4 and stable diffusion models, have made a paradigm shift in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) towards generative AI-based systems. AI and machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms are envisioned to be pervasively incorporated into the future wireless communications systems. In this article, we outline the applications of diffusion models in wireless communication systems, which are a new family of probabilistic generative models that have showcased state-of-the-art performance. The key idea is to decompose data generation process over "denoising" steps, gradually generating samples out of noise. Based on two case studies presented, we show how diffusion models can be employed for the development of resilient AI-native communication systems. Specifically, we propose denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) for a wireless communication scheme with non-ideal transceivers, where 30% improvement is achieved in terms of bit error rate. In the other example, DDPM is employed at the transmitter to shape the constellation symbols, highlighting a robust out-of-distribution performance.

Last week, after briefly deposed CEO Sam Altman was reinstalled at OpenAI, two reports claimed that a top-secret project at the company had rattled some researchers there with its potential to solve intractable problems in a powerful new way. "Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems," Reuters reported, citing a single unnamed source. "Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*'s future success." The Information said that Q* was seen as a breakthrough that would lead to "far more powerful artificial intelligence models," adding that "the pace of development alarmed some researchers focused on AI safety," citing a single unnamed source. Reuters also reported that some researchers sent a letter expressing concerns about Q*'s potential power to the nonprofit board that ejected Altman, although a WIRED source familiar with the board's thinking says that was not the case.

ChatGPT is one year old today, and it's accomplished a lot in its first trip around the sun. The chatbot has upended or outright killed high-school and college essay writing and thoroughly scrambled the brains of academics, creating an on-campus arms race that professors have already lost. It has been used to write books, article summaries, and political content, and it has flooded online marketplaces with computer-generated slop. As we've gotten to know ChatGPT, we've noticed how malleable it is. The li'l bot loves clichés.

Microsoft will take a non-voting, observer position on OpenAI's board, CEO Sam Altman said in his first official missive after taking back the reins of the company on Wednesday. The observer position means Microsoft's representative can attend OpenAI's board meetings and access confidential information, but it does not have voting rights on matters including electing or choosing directors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who had recruited Altman to Microsoft after Altman's ouster from OpenAI, had said earlier that governance at the ChatGPT maker needs to change. OpenAI announced a new initial board last week that consists of former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chair and Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary. Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, who was part of the board who fired Altman, also stayed on.

The Biden White House recently enacted its latest executive order designed to establish a guiding framework for generative artificial intelligence development -- including content authentication and using digital watermarks to indicate when digital assets made by the Federal government are computer generated. Here's how it and similar copy protection technologies might help content creators more securely authenticate their online works in an age of generative AI misinformation. Analog watermarking techniques were first developed in Italy in 1282. Papermakers would implant thin wires into the paper mold, which would create almost imperceptibly thinner areas of the sheet which would become apparent when held up to a light. Not only were analog watermarks used to authenticate where and how a company's products were produced, the marks could also be leveraged to pass concealed, encoded messages.

OpenAI said that Sam Altman was officially reinstated as chief executive officer and that it has a new initial board of directors, with Microsoft Corp. joining as a nonvoting observer. The announcement Wednesday, a blog post penned by Altman, comes two weeks after the CEO's shock firing from the artificial intelligence startup, followed by an operatic boardroom power struggle. OpenAI also said that Mira Murati -- who had been chief technology officer until Altman's ousting when she was briefly named interim CEO -- is once again the company's CTO. OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman will return as the company's president after he quit in protest over Altman's firing. Microsoft, the company's largest investor, had not previously had a position on the board before it took the observer role.

Over the course of two months from its debut in November 2022, ChatGPT exploded in popularity, from niche online curio to 100 million monthly active users -- the fastest user base growth in the history of the Internet. In less than a year, it has earned the backing of Silicon Valley's biggest firms, and been shoehorned into myriad applications from academia and the arts to marketing, medicine, gaming and government. In short ChatGPT is just about everywhere. Few industries have remained untouched by the viral adoption of the generative AI's tools. On the first anniversary of its release, let's take a look back on the year of ChatGPT that brought us here.