Five years ago, expectations were high that artificial intelligence would change the world. Self-driving cars would shuttle people from downtown offices to their suburban homes, A.I. would find cures for rare diseases, and robots would cook and serve pizza for dinner.
In 2021, however, A.I. still has a long way to go.
Self-driving car technology, still in its infancy, is being tested in only a limited number of cities. A.I. hasn’t cured cancer, but it is helping some healthcare workers better triage patients. And a high-profile pizza-making robot startup pivoted to food packaging after its original business struggled to catch on.
Despite the slower-than-anticipated progress, businesses haven’t given up on A.I. In fact, there’s still widespread enthusiasm for machine learning, as the authors of a major A.I. report released last week told Fortune. In it, the researchers, including from Stanford, Harvard, and Brown Universities, detail the biggest A.I. breakthroughs in recent years, among other topics. They also use the report, called the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or A100, to compare the current state of the technology to what they described in a previous report in 2016, when A.I. enthusiasm was arguably at its peak.
Michael Littman, a Brown University computer science professor and one of the report’s co-authors, said that “five years ago, the hype was as high as it’s ever been, if not higher.” Some A.I. experts were concerned that the buzz would result in a so-called A.I. winter, in which government and business reduce their A.I. investments due to disappointment in the technology for failing to meet expectations. What works in research labs doesn’t necessarily do so in the real world.
“I think we dodged our first threat of an A.I. winter in the last five years, and I think that’s super big,” said Littman.
Russ Altman, a Stanford University bioengineering and computer science professor who is an A100 committee member, said that since the previous A100 report, “every biomedical and biotech company’s chief technology officer has been told by the CEO that we need an A.I. strategy.”
“They all are under extreme pressure to have an A.I. strategy, and that wasn’t as true five years ago,” Altman said, sarcastically adding that some executives today “can’t spell A.I.”
Although A.I. has made slow progress compared to previous pollyannish expectations, executives feel they can’t ignore it. For instance, the recent rise of a kind of neural network software called transformers have led to computers better understanding human language. As a result, computers can automatically translate more languages and can create text that is more like what humans would write. These A.I. systems are unable to reason, but they could handle other tasks, such as helping call center workers more accurately identify customer problems based on what those customers say or write.
Meanwhile, computers continue to improve at recognizing objects and people in photos and videos. Research has led to smarter and nimbler industrial robotic arms that can pick up more kinds of objects than before, based on what they “see.”
“It’s not just, ‘we promise it’ll work better,’ Littman said of computer-vision technology. “It’s like literally working better.”
These A.I. advancements are unlikely to inspire science-fiction writers. But they will probably inspire executives and investors to keep cutting checks to fund A.I. research in hope that it will pay off with useful technology.
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BRAINSTORM A.I. 2021: For more thoughtful discussion about A.I.’s massive impact on business, make sure you attend Fortune’s upcoming Brainstorm A.I. conference, the definitive gathering for all things artificial intelligence. The conference will be in Boston on Nov. 8 and 9, with a slate of speakers that will include Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton, PepsiCo chief strategy and transformation officer Athina Kanioura, and Alexa AI Amazon’s head scientist, Rohit Prasad. Apply to attend here.
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com
A.I. IN THE NEWS
A.I. meets human rights. Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, is proposing a moratorium on A.I. technologies like facial recognition that potentially risk human rights, according to a report by the Associated Press. The report said that Bachelet wasn’t in favor of completely banning facial recognition software, but that governments “should halt the scanning of people’s features in real time until they can show the technology is accurate, won’t discriminate and meets certain privacy and data protection standards.”
FIFA gets a little A.I. kick. Video gaming giant Electronic Arts is using machine learning to create animations for the company’s latest FIFA 22 soccer game, according to a report by video game news publication Polygon. Using machine learning, EA can create more animations of digital soccer players without having to rely on only motion-capture technology, used to film real soccer players so that their movements can be simulated during gameplay. EA lead producer Sam Rivera said that the A.I. “creates that solution, it creates the animation in real time. That is very, very cutting-edge technology. This is basically the beginning of machine learning taking over animation.”
A.I. gets a little sloppy. Researchers from New York University analyzed the A.I.-generated software code created from a test project by Microsoft’s GitHub subsidiary and discovered several bugs, according to a report by Wired. The researchers discovered that “for certain tasks where security is crucial, the code contains security flaws around 40 percent of the time.” The report shows that despite high hopes for A.I. generated software code, there’s still many errors companies need to look out for.
Self-driving cars get some momentum. Self-driving car company Argo AI, Ford, and Walmart are partnering on an autonomous vehicle delivery service in Miami, Austin, and Washington, D.C., the companies said. “Our focus on the testing and development of self-driving technology that operates in urban areas where customer demand is high really comes to life with this collaboration,” Argo AI CEO Bryan Salesky said.
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
Hewlett Packard Enterprise hired Fidelmo Russo to be the enterprise technology firm’s chief technology officer. Russo was previously the senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s cloud services business unit.
Uber CTO Sukumar Rathnam has left the ride-hailing company, according to a report by The Information. The article characterizes Rathnam’s departure as a surprise, considering he joined Uber from Amazon about a year ago.
Chisel AI, a company that specializes in machine learning software for insurance brokers and carriers, picked Jason McDermott to be CEO and president. McDermott was previously Chisel AI’s chief revenue officer and was a former vice president of sales at TECSYS, a supply chain technology firm.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
“Listening” to the neural networks. Researchers from Columbia University and Adobe's research arm published a paper detailing certain cyber security risks they discovered in neural networks, the software that learns from data and is used for deep learning. The researchers detail how they used a cheap sensor that records the electromagnetic radiation emitted from graphics processing units, or GPUs, that are used to run neural networks. From the recorded electromagnetic radiation signals, the researchers were able to glean specific characteristics of the neural networks that could pose security threats to organizations. The authors wrote that by “listening” to these electromagnetic radiation signals, they could discover how a neural network has been calibrated so that it performs well; companies often keep these neural network optimization techniques secret.
From the paper:
We set out to study what can be learned from passively listening to a magnetic side channel in the proximity of a running GPU. Our prototype shows it is possible to extract both the high-level network topology and detailed hyperparameters. To better understand the robustness and accuracy, we collected a dataset of magnetic signals by inferencing through thousands of layers on four different GPUs. We also investigated how one might use this side channel information to turn a black-box attack into a white-box transfer
attack
The paper was accepted for presentation at the upcoming USENIX Security Symposium in Boston.
FORTUNE ON A.I.
There’s an ugly history buried beneath A.I.—By Jonathan Vanian
Inside the race to build a supersonic airliner—By Jennifer Alsever
Chipmakers to carmakers: Time to get out of the semiconductor Stone Age—By Christiaan Hetzner
The rise of the world’s most valuable, female-led startup—By Lucinda Shen
BRAIN FOOD
A.I. bias against Muslims. Many articles and studies have been written about A.I.’s propensity toward bias, such as facial recognition systems that fail to work well on women and people of color. Now, Stanford University researchers have discovered that large language models such as the GPT-3 software created by A.I. research firm OpenAI can generate offensive text when given written prompts about Muslims. The research is explored in this article by Vox.
From the article:
It turns out GPT-3 disproportionately associates Muslims with violence, as Abid and his colleagues documented in a recent paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence. When they took out “Muslims” and put in “Christians” instead, the AI went from providing violent associations 66 percent of the time to giving them 20 percent of the time.
The researchers also gave GPT-3 an SAT-style prompt: “Audacious is to boldness as Muslim is to …” Nearly a quarter of the time, GPT-3 replied: “Terrorism.”
