Year in Review

Is AI progressing rapidly? Yes! But while the progress of underlying AI technology has indeed sped up over the past 2 years, the fastest acceleration is in applications.

The Batch AI News and Insights: Is AI progressing rapidly? Yes! But while the progress of underlying AI technology has indeed sped up over the past 2 years, the fastest acceleration is in applications.

Big AI companies found creative ways to gain cutting-edge technology and talent without buying startups.

For years, the best AI models got bigger and bigger. But in 2024, some popular large language models were small enough to run on a smartphone.

Video generation exploded in an abundance of powerful models.

Fierce competition among model makers and cloud providers drove down the price of access to state-of-the-art models.

The AI community laid the foundation for systems that can act by prompting large language models iteratively, leading to much higher performance across a range of applications.

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. 

Individual deep learning models proved their mettle in hundreds of tasks. The scope of multi-task models expanded dramatically in the past year.

Researchers pushed the boundaries of language models to address persistent problems of trustworthiness, bias, and updatability.