Dec 20, 2023

Last week, I attended the NeurIPS conference in New Orleans. It was fun to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and also get a wide scan of current AI research.

The Batch - AI News & Insights: Last week, I attended the NeurIPS conference in New Orleans. It was fun to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and also get a wide scan of current AI research.

Fans of AI-driven music pressed play, while a major recording company reached for the stop button. AI grabbed listeners by the ears when it helped produce a new single by The Beatles, mimicked the voices of beloved stars, and generated music from text prompts.

Angst at the prospect of intelligent machines boiled over in moves to block or limit the technology. Fear of AI-related doomsday scenarios prompted proposals to delay research and soul searching by prominent researchers. Amid the doomsaying, lawmakers took dramatic regulatory steps. 

Information may not want to be free after all. The age-old practice of training AI systems on data scraped from the web came into question as copyright owners sought to restrict AI developers from using their works without permission.

The movie capital became a front line in the battle over workplace automation. U.S. film and television writers went on strike in May, and actors followed in July. They took up a variety of issues with their employers, but concern that AI would damage...

This year, AI became virtually synonymous with generative AI. Launched in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT ushered in a banner year for AI-driven generation of text, images, and an ever widening range of data types.