2021: A year in AI (so far)

If 2020 was the year of large language models and meta-learning, 2021 so far has been the year of large, multi-modal models that combine vision and text together. OpenAI's CLIP and DALL-E models have shown just how robust the combination of language modeling and vision can be. DALL-E in particular has shown itself to be capable of generating very impressive images based on user-specified text prompts. Presumably, there's much more to come in this area, including integrations with robotics and a continued push toward bringing AI into the physical world. New questions are being raised about when and how AI should be applied, given established problems with bias in AI algorithms.