Within the tech trade, 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 corporations, 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 attempting to maintain their growing old 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 a number of lesser-known tech initiatives that struck me as helpful. This yr, as you’ll see, lots of the awards contain synthetic intelligence, however my purpose was to sidestep the polarized debates about whether or not A.I. will destroy the world or put it aside 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 at all times, my award standards are obscure and subjective, and no precise trophies or prizes are concerned. These are simply small, private blurbs of appreciation for a number of tech initiatives I believed had actual, apparent worth to humanity in 2023.
To Be My Eyes, Apple and researchers on the College of Texas at Austin, for bettering accessibility by means of A.I.
Accessibility — the time period for making tech merchandise extra usable by folks with disabilities — has been an underappreciated space of enchancment this yr. A number of latest advances in synthetic intelligence — comparable to multimodal A.I. fashions that may interpret pictures and switch textual content into speech — have made it doable for tech corporations to construct new options for disabled customers. That is, I’d argue, an unambiguously good use of A.I., and an space the place folks’s lives are already bettering in significant methods.
I requested Steven Aquino, a contract journalist who makes a speciality of accessible tech, to advocate his prime accessibility breakthroughs of 2023. He advisable Be My Eyes, an organization that makes know-how for folks with impaired imaginative and prescient. In 2023, Be My Eyes introduced a characteristic often called Be My AI, powered by OpenAI’s know-how, that enables blind and low-sighted folks to purpose their smartphone digicam 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 know-how to create an artificial model of a consumer’s voice. The characteristic was designed for people who find themselves prone to dropping their capacity to talk, comparable to these with a latest prognosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or one other degenerative illness, and offers them a option to protect their talking voice in order that their associates, kinfolk and family members can hear from them lengthy into the longer term.
I’ll throw in another promising accessibility breakthrough: A analysis staff 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 folks’s minds, basically. This type of know-how, which makes use of an A.I. language mannequin to decode mind exercise from fMRI scans, feels like science fiction. Nevertheless it might make it simpler for folks 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 Prescribed drugs and CRISPR Therapeutics, for placing gene modifying to good use
When CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene modifying software, broke into public consciousness a decade in the past, doomsayers predicted that it would result in a dystopian world of gene-edited “designer infants” and nightmare eugenics experiments. As a substitute, the know-how has been permitting scientists to make regular progress towards treating various harrowing illnesses.
In December, the Meals and Drug Administration authorized the primary gene-editing remedy for people — a therapy for sickle cell illness, known as Exa-cel, that was collectively developed by Vertex Prescribed drugs of Boston and CRISPR Therapeutics of Switzerland.
Exa-cel makes use of CRISPR to edit the gene accountable 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 troublesome to manage, the therapy presents 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 vital 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 attempting to decipher a set of historical papyrus manuscripts often called the Herculaneum Scrolls. The scrolls, which belonged to a library owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, have been buried underneath a mountain of ash in 79 A.D. through the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They have been so completely carbonized that they couldn’t be opened with out ruining them.
Now, A.I. has made it doable 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 laptop science scholar, Luke Farritor, received a $40,000 intermediate prize for deciphering a single phrase — “purple” — from one of many scrolls. I really like the concept of utilizing A.I. to unlock knowledge from the traditional previous, and I really like the public-minded spirit of this competitors.
To Waymo, for taking the gradual street to self-driving
I spent quite a lot of time in 2023 being shuttled round San Francisco in self-driving vehicles. Robotic taxis are a controversial know-how — and there are nonetheless loads of kinks to be labored out — however for essentially the most half I purchase the concept self-driving vehicles will in the end make our roads safer by changing fallible, distracted human drivers with always-alert A.I. chauffeurs.
Cruise, one of many two corporations that have been giving robotic taxi rides in San Francisco, has imploded in latest days, after certainly one of its automobiles struck and dragged a girl who had been hit by one other automotive. California regulators mentioned the corporate had misled them concerning the incident; Cruise pulled its vehicles from the streets, and its chief government, 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 strategy 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: In accordance with a research the corporate performed with Swiss Re, an insurance coverage agency, in 3.8 million self-driving miles Waymo’s vehicles have been considerably much less prone to trigger property injury than human-driven vehicles, and led to no bodily harm claims in anyway.
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 should be secure, and Waymo’s slow-and-steady strategy 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 traits of 2023 was seeing governments around the globe get entangled in attempting to grasp and regulate A.I.
However all that involvement requires work — and in the USA, quite a lot of that work has fallen to the Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Know-how, a small federal company that was beforehand higher recognized for issues like ensuring clocks and scales have been correctly calibrated.
The Biden administration’s government order on synthetic intelligence, launched in October, designated NIST as one of many major federal businesses accountable for preserving tabs on A.I. progress and mitigating its dangers. The order directs the company to develop methods of testing A.I. methods for security, provide you with workouts to assist A.I. corporations establish 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 folks and has an annual price range of $1.24 billion, is tiny in contrast with different federal businesses doing essential security work. (For scale: The Division of Homeland Safety has an annual price range of practically $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 carried out by NIST and different businesses so as to give ourselves a preventing likelihood.
And on that word: Pleased holidays, and see you subsequent yr!
