Don't Let Mistrust of Tech Companies Blind You to the Power of AI

It seems evident to me that almost 70 years after the first conference on artificial intelligence--where the nascent field's leaders suggested the task would be completed within a decade--the field is now poised to make a transformational impact on our lives. We don't need to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI, whatever that means, for this to happen. I wrote as much in this column three weeks ago, citing evidence that after the astonishing leap of large language models that gave us ChatGPT, the advancements had not "plateaued" as some critics were charging. I also disagreed with the wave of skeptics claiming that what looked amazing in OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude 3, Meta's Llama 3, and an armada of Microsoft Copilots was merely a linguistic variation of a card trick. The hype, I insisted, is justified.