Within the tech business, 2023 was a yr of transformation.
Spurred by the success of final yr’s breakout tech star, ChatGPT, Silicon Valley’s giants rushed to show themselves into synthetic intelligence firms, jamming generative A.I. options into their merchandise and racing to construct their very own, extra highly effective A.I. fashions. They did so whereas navigating an unsure tech financial system, with layoffs and pivots galore, and whereas making an attempt to maintain their growing older enterprise fashions aloft.
Not every thing went easily. There have been misbehaving chatbots, crypto foibles and financial institution failures. After which in November, ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, melted down (and rapidly reconstituted itself) over a failed boardroom coup, proving as soon as and for all that there’s no such factor in tech as resting in your laurels.
Each December in my Good Tech Awards column, I attempt to neutralize my very own negativity bias by highlighting just a few lesser-known tech tasks that struck me as useful. This yr, as you’ll see, most of the awards contain synthetic intelligence, however my objective was to sidestep the polarized debates about whether or not A.I. will destroy the world or reserve it and as an alternative deal with the right here and now. What’s A.I. good for in the present day? Whom is it serving to? What sorts of necessary breakthroughs are already being made with A.I. as a catalyst?
As all the time, my award standards are imprecise and subjective, and no precise trophies or prizes are concerned. These are simply small, private blurbs of appreciation for just a few tech tasks I assumed had actual, apparent worth to humanity in 2023.
To Be My Eyes, Apple and researchers on the College of Texas at Austin, for enhancing accessibility via A.I.
Accessibility — the time period for making tech merchandise extra usable by individuals with disabilities — has been an underappreciated space of enchancment this yr. A number of latest advances in synthetic intelligence — akin to multimodal A.I. fashions that may interpret photos and switch textual content into speech — have made it attainable for tech firms to construct new options for disabled customers. That is, I’d argue, an unambiguously good use of A.I., and an space the place individuals’s lives are already enhancing in significant methods.
I requested Steven Aquino, a contract journalist who focuses on accessible tech, to suggest his prime accessibility breakthroughs of 2023. He beneficial Be My Eyes, an organization that makes expertise for individuals with impaired imaginative and prescient. In 2023, Be My Eyes introduced a characteristic often known as Be My AI, powered by OpenAI’s expertise, that permits blind and low-sighted individuals to purpose their smartphone digital camera at an object and have that object described for them in pure language.
Mr. Aquino additionally pointed me to Apple’s new Private Voice characteristic, which is constructed into iOS 17 and makes use of A.I. voice-cloning expertise to create an artificial model of a consumer’s voice. The characteristic was designed for people who find themselves susceptible to shedding their potential to talk, akin to these with a latest analysis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or one other degenerative illness, and offers them a option to protect their talking voice in order that their buddies, family and family members can hear from them lengthy into the longer term.
I’ll throw in another promising accessibility breakthrough: A analysis group on the College of Texas at Austin introduced this yr that it had used A.I. to develop a “noninvasive language decoder” that may translate ideas into speech — learn individuals’s minds, primarily. This sort of expertise, which makes use of an A.I. language mannequin to decode mind exercise from fMRI scans, appears like science fiction. Nevertheless it may make it simpler for individuals with speech loss or paralysis to speak. And it doesn’t require placing an A.I. chip in your mind, which is an added bonus.
To Vertex Prescription drugs and CRISPR Therapeutics, for placing gene enhancing to good use
When CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene enhancing device, broke into public consciousness a decade in the past, doomsayers predicted that it’d result in a dystopian world of gene-edited “designer infants” and nightmare eugenics experiments. As a substitute, the expertise has been permitting scientists to make regular progress towards treating a variety of harrowing ailments.
In December, the Meals and Drug Administration accredited the primary gene-editing remedy for people — a therapy for sickle cell illness, referred to as Exa-cel, that was collectively developed by Vertex Prescription drugs of Boston and CRISPR Therapeutics of Switzerland.
Exa-cel makes use of CRISPR to edit the gene answerable for sickle cell, a debilitating blood illness that impacts roughly 100,000 Individuals, most of whom are Black. Whereas it’s nonetheless wildly costly and tough to manage, the therapy gives new hope to sickle cell sufferers who’ve entry to it.
To Brent Seales, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, for utilizing A.I. to unlock antiquity’s secrets and techniques
One of the crucial enjoyable interviews I did on my podcast this yr was with Brent Seales, a professor on the College of Kentucky who has spent the previous 20 years making an attempt to decipher a set of historical papyrus manuscripts often known as the Herculaneum Scrolls. The scrolls, which belonged to a library owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, had been buried underneath a mountain of ash in 79 A.D. throughout the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They had been so completely carbonized that they couldn’t be opened with out ruining them.
Now, A.I. has made it attainable to learn these scrolls with out opening them. And this yr, Dr. Seales teamed up with two tech traders, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, to launch the Vesuvius Problem — providing prizes of as much as $1 million to anybody who efficiently deciphers the scrolls.
The grand prize has nonetheless not been received. However the competitors sparked a frenzy of curiosity from beginner historical past buffs, and this yr a 21-year-old pc science pupil, Luke Farritor, received a $40,000 intermediate prize for deciphering a single phrase — “purple” — from one of many scrolls. I like the thought of utilizing A.I. to unlock knowledge from the traditional previous, and I like the public-minded spirit of this competitors.
To Waymo, for taking the gradual street to self-driving
I spent a variety of time in 2023 being shuttled round San Francisco in self-driving vehicles. Robotic taxis are a controversial expertise — and there are nonetheless loads of kinks to be labored out — however for essentially the most half I purchase the concept that self-driving vehicles will finally make our roads safer by changing fallible, distracted human drivers with always-alert A.I. chauffeurs.
Cruise, one of many two firms that had been giving robotic taxi rides in San Francisco, has imploded in latest days, after one in all its autos struck and dragged a lady who had been hit by one other automobile. California regulators mentioned the corporate had misled them in regards to the incident; Cruise pulled its vehicles from the streets, and its chief govt, Kyle Vogt, stepped down.
However not all self-driving vehicles are created equal, and this yr I used to be grateful for the comparatively gradual, methodical method taken by Cruise’s competitor, Waymo.
Waymo, which was spun out of Google in 2016, has been logging miles on public roads for greater than a decade, and it exhibits. The half-dozen rides I took in Waymo vehicles this yr felt safer and smoother than the Cruise rides I took. And Waymo’s security knowledge is compelling: Based on a examine the corporate performed with Swiss Re, an insurance coverage agency, in 3.8 million self-driving miles Waymo’s vehicles had been considerably much less prone to trigger property injury than human-driven vehicles, and led to no bodily harm claims in any respect.
I’ll put my playing cards on the desk: I like self-driving vehicles, and I feel society might be higher off as soon as they’re widespread. However they need to be protected, and Waymo’s slow-and-steady method appears higher suited to the duty.
To the Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Know-how, for managing America’s A.I. transition
One of many extra stunning — and, to my thoughts, heartening — tech tendencies of 2023 was seeing governments around the globe get entangled in making an attempt to grasp and regulate A.I.
However all that involvement requires work — and in the USA, a variety of that work has fallen to the Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Know-how, a small federal company that was beforehand higher identified for issues like ensuring clocks and scales had been correctly calibrated.
The Biden administration’s govt order on synthetic intelligence, launched in October, designated NIST as one of many main federal companies answerable for preserving tabs on A.I. progress and mitigating its dangers. The order directs the company to develop methods of testing A.I. programs for security, provide you with workouts to assist A.I. firms determine doubtlessly dangerous makes use of of their merchandise, and produce analysis and pointers for watermarking A.I.-generated content material, amongst different issues.
NIST, which employs about 3,400 individuals and has an annual price range of $1.24 billion, is tiny in contrast with different federal companies doing important security work. (For scale: The Division of Homeland Safety has an annual price range of almost $100 billion.) Nevertheless it’s necessary that the federal government construct up its personal A.I. capabilities to successfully regulate the advances being made by private-sector A.I. labs, and we’ll want to take a position extra within the work being executed by NIST and different companies with a view to give ourselves a preventing probability.
And on that be aware: Completely happy holidays, and see you subsequent yr!
