CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts—On Wednesday, AI enthusiasts and experts gathered to hear a series of presentations about the state of AI at EmTech Digital 2024 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's campus. The event was hosted by the publication MIT Technology Review. The overall consensus is that generative AI is still in its very early stages—with policy, regulations, and social norms still being established—and its growth is likely to continue into the future.
I was there to check the event out. MIT is the birthplace of many tech innovations—including the first action-oriented computer video game—among others, so it felt fitting to hear talks about the latest tech craze in the same building that hosts MIT's Media Lab on its sprawling and lush campus.
EmTech's speakers included AI researchers, policy experts, critics, and company spokespeople. A corporate feel pervaded the event due to strategic sponsorships, but it was handled in a low-key way that matches the level-headed tech coverage coming out of MIT Technology Review. After each presentation, MIT Technology Review staff—such as Editor-in-Chief Mat Honan and Senior Reporter Melissa Heikkilä—did a brief sit-down interview with the speaker, pushing back on some points and emphasizing others. Then the speaker took a few audience questions if time allowed.
The conference kicked off with an overview of the state of AI by Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of Air Street Capital, who rounded up news headlines about AI and several times expressed a favorable view toward defense spending on AI, making a few people visibly shift in their seats. Next up, Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of Academics at MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing, spoke about the potential for "human flourishing" through AI-human symbiosis and the importance of AI regulation.
Kari Ann Briski, VP of AI Models, Software, and Services at Nvidia, highlighted the exponential growth of AI model complexity. She shared a prediction from consulting firm Gartner research that by 2026, 50 percent of customer service organizations will have customer-facing AI agents. Of course, Nvidia’s job is to drive demand for its chips, so in her presentation, Briski painted the AI space as an unqualified rosy situation, assuming that all LLMs are (and will be) useful and reliable, despite what we know about their tendencies to make things up.
But there is a whole class of AI that is used to discover how proteins function, or diagnose cancers.
I'm hoping we don't stifle the positives when we regulate the negatives.