🔮 Will AI agents enter your business this year?; economic efficiency vs. welfare; modelling breakdown; Tot-AI-l Football ++ #466
Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. In this week’s edition, we explore
The potential of AI agents
A Nobel laureate’s critique of mainstream economics
How climate models struggle to keep pace with reality
I published my latest conversation with one of the leading researchers working at the intersection of generative AI, education and work,
. We discuss our favourite use cases for genAI, how you should think about implementation and what students should be learn in a world of AI.🔥 Unleashing the power of AI, with Ethan Mollick
This is a must-listen for anyone who’s even remotely interested in implementing AI in their work and organisation. Share widely. Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies and teaches innovation, entrepreneurship, and AI’s impact on work and education. I think of him as the Jacques Cousteau of dee…
🐙 Thanks to our sponsor OctoAI. Mixtral on OctoAI: 12x lower costs, 30% faster speeds vs GPT-4-Turbo.
Sunday chart: Will agents drive the next breakthrough in business adoption of AI?
Andrew Ng has said that “AI agentic workflows will drive massive AI progress this year — perhaps even more than the next generation of foundation models”. His team shows that by employing iterative refinement techniques, the performance of language models like GPT-3.5 on coding tasks can improve dramatically from 48% to over 95%. Notably, the performance of GPT-3.5 in these workflows is very close to GPT-4.
As computational resources continue to expand — as seen with NVIDIA’s recent announcement of its next-generation Blackwell GPUs — the feasibility of applying agentic workflows to a wider range of tasks will likely grow. At a system level, NVIDIA claims the new GPUs outperform the previous generation of H100s by over 30 times for inference. This will undoubtedly make agentic workflows more accessible and cost-effective. This increased computational capacity will enable users to apply agentic workflows to larger-scale tasks, such as iterating over an entire book instead of just a single chapter, at around the same cost.
Back in EV#458, we covered a study that found only 23% of vision tasks are worth automating at current costs. We questioned whether this finding would extend to large language models. Given the rate at which computation resources are expanding, combined with advancements in agentic workflows, I increasingly doubt that it does. As agents become drastically more cost-effective, they’ll become no-brainers for businesses.
Dig deeper: my conversation with Andrew Ng on AI in businesses.
🚀 Today’s edition is supported by OctoAI.
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Key reads
The new oil. Anticipating a future where their black gold may lose its lustre to renewable energy, Gulf monarchies UAE and Saudi Arabia are positioning themselves as essential players in the AI sector. The UAE has taken a comprehensive approach under its impressive AI Minister, Omar Al Olama: supporting the open-source AI model, Falcon; building computes capacity with Nvida and Cerebras; making use of low energy prices; and using access to health and industrial data. Saudi Arabia has plans for a $40 billion AI investment fund, making it the industry’s largest investor. Along with other countries, they’ve endeavoured to entice AI talent from the EU, where the AI Act imposes the world’s most stringent AI restrictions aimed at safeguarding the welfare of citizens (whether that’s detrimental or beneficial to AI development). The world is getting spikier.
Markets: Morals are optional. In a thought-provoking critique, Nobel laureate Angus Deaton challenges the foundations of mainstream economics, suggesting it would benefit from some long-overdue introspection, especially at a time when exponential technologies are achieving great efficiencies and consolidating power. Economics has become overly focused on market efficiency, he argues, while neglecting the crucial roles of power and ethics. A recent NBER paper explores scenarios for the transition to AGI, with the unsurprising conclusion that wages are likely to collapse. Although not imminent, this scenario highlights the importance of considering the distribution of benefits, not just efficiency gains. Human well-being should be the primary concern, says Deaton, calling for economists to engage with ideas from other fields and adopt greater humility. (Similarly, in the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, 71% of Brits rejected the five-decade consensus view that companies should only focus on shareholder outcomes.)
Fractured projections. In 2023, climate change made its presence known to the public in a tangible way, with record-breaking temperatures that even climate modellers failed to predict accurately. Prominent NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt acknowledges that despite considering all existing theories, a large 0.2-degree discrepancy remains in explaining the unexpected warmth. While climate change sceptics often criticise the complexity of climate models, this knowledge gap ironically supports their argument, albeit in the opposite direction. Schmidt suggests two possible implications: either the climate has already shifted more rapidly than anticipated, or statistical inferences based on historical data are less reliable than previously believed.
What ever happened to the humans?1 Plummeting global fertility rates will lead to a demographically divided world, says a Gates-funded study in the Lancet. It recommends urgent action and innovative solutions to navigate these complex challenges. Countries with ageing populations may face labour shortages and pressure of social security programmes to the point that nations might implement pro-natal policies. Youth-heavy societies are in the regions with most chaotic institutions and facing the greatest climate challenges. It is a difficult mix. And I think the study poses an ever harder set of questions. By 2075, our whole species might, on average, be below the population replacement rate. Could the future belong to communities that maintained high fertility rates during the 22nd and 23rd centuries?
💬 Community event
Will 2024 be the year that crypto infrastructure innovation delivers a technology ready for widespread adoption?
We’ve invited one of the founders at the forefront of the industry, CEO of Superchain Network James Corbett, to share how he sees the current state of the industry and what’s being built to deliver on expectations from Web3.
The event is open to members of EV on 4 April at 5pm UK / 1pm ET / 10am PT.
Spots are limited, RSVP is mandatory.
Newsreel
The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence systems.
The US Justice Department sues Apple, accusing it of illegally maintaining an iPhone monopoly that hurts consumers and smaller competitors.
Also in Apple news: the company is exploring AI partnerships with Google and OpenAI to boost iPhone features.
The White House proposes up to $8.5 billion in CHIPS Act funding for Intel to boost domestic chip manufacturing. See also, the Department of Homeland Security becomes the first US federal agency to embrace AI, with a comprehensive plan to integrate the technology across various divisions.
LONGi, the world’s largest solar manufacturer, plans to cut up to 30% of its 80,000-strong workforce amid industry overcapacity and fierce competition.
Tennessee is the first US state to legally protect music industry professionals from the (mis)use of AI without artists’ consent.
Data
Between 2006 and 2010, happiness among young people aged 15-24 in North America has fallen sharply, leading to a reversal where the young are now less happy than older adults.
The surplus of cobalt, a key metal for batteries, from CMOC’s Democratic Republic of Congo mines has caused the metal’s annual average price to plummet to $15.10 in 2023, a staggering 50% drop from the previous year and the lowest since 2016. This glut is expected to last until 2028.
A significant portion of peer review text, ranging from 6.5% to 16.9%, submitted to prominent AI conferences such as ICLR 2024, NeurIPS 2023, CoRL 2023 and EMNLP 2023, is likely to have been extensively altered or generated by LLMs.
With 14.5 million followers on Spotify, Joe Rogan has nearly tripled the audience of the next biggest podcast TED Talks Daily, which has five million followers.
Accenture has booked $1.05 billion in genAI projects in the last two quarters. On the other hand, Cohere, a startup competitor to OpenAI, was only making a reported $13 million in annualised revenues at the end of last year. (Listen to my conversation with the co-founder and CEO of Cohere, Aidan Gomez.)
Short morsels to appear smart at dinner parties
🤖 Melanie Mitchell, in a wonderful essay reflecting on the changing definition of AGI.
🌒 China is aiming for the dark side of the moon.
🦇 The survival of bats is crucial for maintaining supplies of foods including mezcal and rice.
⚽ DeepMind and Liverpool FC’s TacticAI introduces AI to form football strategies and coaching.
🌊 65% of the Netherlands would’ve been underwater at high tide had it not built its intricate water-management systems.
End note
As part of a NASA Symposium on 30-31 March 1993, science fiction author and mathematician Vernor Vinge presented a paper introducing a new concept: the technological singularity.
In this prescient paper, The coming technological singularity: How to survive in the post-human era, Vinge offered an early articulation of the possibility of a technological singularity that we are still actively debating. Vinge passed away this week.
The paper is worth going to back to (or reading for the first time) even if the concept of the singularity has been a bit disruptive to debates about technology!
Cheers,
A
What you’re up to — community updates
Rumman Chowdhury has been appointed as one of the US State Dept Science Envoys.
Ted Lechterman has been awarded a UNESCO Chair in AI Ethics and Governance at IE University.
Microsoft names Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, as head of its new AI division.
Emad Mostaque leaves Stability.AI to focus on decentralised AI.
Share your updates with EV readers by telling us what you’re up to here.
Homage here to “No More Heroes” by The Stranglers. What it isn’t in your “Liked Songs” yet? It should be!