Founder and CEO of tech platform Gloo Scott Beck tells'Fox & Friends Weekend' that God'allowed' AI to exist and have its convergence with faith. We tend to view progress as (1) inevitable, (2) necessary, and (3) good for everyone. It is inevitable, in part, because we must have new ideas and tools at our disposal to address emerging challenges. Progress is necessary because without it we may become incapable of surviving (or being comfortable) in a broken world. It is good for everyone because its fruits make it easier to survive in the systems we have created. We, and we assume everyone else, are better off than we would be if forced to deal with the struggles of previous eras.

Things get dicey if we ask NLP models to fend entirely for themselves in unattended dialogue with humans. At its recent I/O developer conference, Google showcased its Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), a (very) large language model trained on dialogue and optimised to reproduce the "sensibleness", "specificity" and "interestingness" of human conversation. The demo is super-impressive – we've moved way on from the 2019 (only two years ago!) leading language model GPT-2 which frequently produced nonsensical content because it didn't have an "understanding" of the world it was describing (I remember fires breaking out underwater in one of its generated stories). They are, nonetheless, essentially still probabilistic models generating new text word-by-word enslaved to the patterns, no matter how nuanced, seen in training data – what I call "novel replication", but what others have less charitably described as "stochastic parrots". Although top-down statistical analyses and careful cleansing of the training data can minimise biases and instances of hate speech, they can nonetheless still get things monumentally wrong.

If AI were a religion, I would be its most ardent devotee. But with devotion eventually comes doubt. The trials sent to test me have taken the form of increasingly hyperbolic predictions for the economic impact of AI. In the last months I've seen three studies that each sized the market for AI in the many trillions of dollars within five to ten years, in one case for the US alone. Given the global economy in its entirety was around $85tn in 2020, you'd be forgiven for wondering whether we've reached peak AI euphoria (with bubble-puncture around the corner) and just how much true substance there is to AI's impact.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not for the fainthearted. An AI project does not follow the calm predictable waters of software development.