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 economic system, with layoffs and pivots galore, and whereas making an attempt to maintain their getting old enterprise fashions aloft.
Not every part went easily. There have been misbehaving chatbots, crypto foibles and financial institution failures. After which in November, ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, melted down (and shortly 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 just a few lesser-known tech tasks that struck me as helpful. This yr, as you’ll see, lots of the awards contain synthetic intelligence, however my aim was to sidestep the polarized debates about whether or not A.I. will destroy the world or reserve it and as an alternative give attention to the right here and now. What’s A.I. good for right this moment? Whom is it serving to? What sorts of vital 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 just a few tech tasks 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 enhancing accessibility via A.I.
Accessibility — the time period for making tech merchandise extra usable by individuals with disabilities — has been an underappreciated space of enchancment this yr. A number of current advances in synthetic intelligence — equivalent 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 individuals’s lives are already enhancing 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 individuals with impaired imaginative and prescient. In 2023, Be My Eyes introduced a function often called Be My AI, powered by OpenAI’s know-how, that permits blind and low-sighted individuals to goal their smartphone digital camera at an object and have that object described for them in pure language.
Mr. Aquino additionally pointed me to Apple’s new Private Voice function, which is constructed into iOS 17 and makes use of A.I. voice-cloning know-how to create an artificial model of a person’s voice. The function was designed for people who find themselves liable to shedding their capacity to talk, equivalent to these with a current analysis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or one other degenerative illness, and provides them a technique to protect their talking voice in order that their mates, relations and family members can hear from them lengthy into the longer term.
I’ll throw in another promising accessibility breakthrough: A analysis group 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 individuals’s minds, primarily. This sort of know-how, which makes use of an A.I. language mannequin to decode mind exercise from fMRI scans, feels like science fiction. However it might make it simpler for individuals 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 enhancing to good use
When CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene enhancing software, broke into public consciousness a decade in the past, doomsayers predicted that it’d result in a dystopian world of gene-edited “designer infants” and nightmare eugenics experiments. As an alternative, the know-how has been permitting scientists to make regular progress towards treating quite a few harrowing ailments.
In December, the Meals and Drug Administration accredited the primary gene-editing remedy for people — a remedy 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 answerable 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 remedy affords 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 making an attempt 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, had been buried below a mountain of ash in 79 A.D. throughout the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They had 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 buyers, 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 gained. However the competitors sparked a frenzy of curiosity from novice historical past buffs, and this yr a 21-year-old pc science scholar, Luke Farritor, gained 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 highway to self-driving
I spent a variety of time in 2023 being shuttled round San Francisco in self-driving automobiles. Robotic taxis are a controversial know-how — and there are nonetheless loads of kinks to be labored out — however for probably the most half I purchase the concept that self-driving automobiles will finally make our roads safer by changing fallible, distracted human drivers with always-alert A.I. chauffeurs.
Cruise, one of many two corporations that had been giving robotic taxi rides in San Francisco, has imploded in current days, after certainly one of its automobiles struck and dragged a lady who had been hit by one other automobile. California regulators mentioned the corporate had misled them concerning the incident; Cruise pulled its automobiles from the streets, and its chief govt, Kyle Vogt, stepped down.
However not all self-driving automobiles are created equal, and this yr I used to be grateful for the comparatively gradual, methodical method 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 automobiles this yr felt safer and smoother than the Cruise rides I took. And Waymo’s security knowledge is compelling: Based on a research the corporate performed with Swiss Re, an insurance coverage agency, in 3.8 million self-driving miles Waymo’s automobiles had been considerably much less more likely to trigger property injury than human-driven automobiles, and led to no bodily damage claims in any way.
I’ll put my playing cards on the desk: I like self-driving automobiles, and I feel society will likely be higher off as soon as they’re widespread. However they must be secure, and Waymo’s slow-and-steady method appears higher suited to the duty.
To the Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Expertise, for managing America’s A.I. transition
One of many extra shocking — and, to my thoughts, heartening — tech tendencies of 2023 was seeing governments around the globe get entangled in making an attempt to know and regulate A.I.
However all that involvement requires work — and in the USA, a variety of that work has fallen to the Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Expertise, a small federal company that was beforehand higher recognized for issues like ensuring clocks and scales had been correctly calibrated.
The Biden administration’s govt order on synthetic intelligence, launched in October, designated NIST as one of many main federal companies answerable for retaining tabs on A.I. progress and mitigating its dangers. The order directs the company to develop methods of testing A.I. techniques for security, provide you with workout routines to assist A.I. corporations establish probably 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 individuals and has an annual funds of $1.24 billion, is tiny in contrast with different federal companies doing vital security work. (For scale: The Division of Homeland Safety has an annual funds of practically $100 billion.) However it’s vital 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 speculate extra within the work being executed by NIST and different companies with a purpose to give ourselves a preventing likelihood.
And on that be aware: Blissful holidays, and see you subsequent yr!
