What Artificial Intelligence Has Been Succeeding At – II

Got three new articles possibly pertinent to this topic this week – two were negative or sort of, so will set them aside and add only the last to my pile.

According to Eric Revell in “Goldman Sachs announces firmwide launch of AI assistant” (Fox Business, June 23^rd), this generative AI tool, “tailored to meet the needs of workers in various specialties across the firm,” is intended to “positively impact” their “daily tasks.”  The piece doesn’t get any more specific than that, so we’ll hold off on praising it more.

Also too general, but firmer in the present tense, is “Salesforce boss reveals the stunning amount of work now handled by AI” (Aislinn Murphy, Fox Business, June 26^th).  Salesforce’s CEO “revealed the software company uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to perform a good deal of its work,” in fact “30% to 50% of” it.  He said the company “has experienced roughly 93% accuracy in its own technology and its work with customers,” but he seems happy with that.  Can his workers catch that 7%, and, including that, how much time and money does the company save?

As I am sure applicants have suspected for a while, “Welcome to Your Job Interview.  Your Interviewer Is A.I.” (Natalie Rocha, The New York Times, July 7^th).  It does telephone screenings, and in one recent example, after admitting it was “not a human,” it could pose questions about qualifications but “could not answer most of (the interviewee’s) questions about the job.”  Its efforts, despite “a friendly tone,” “felt hollow.”  Nothing deceptive here, as other employment-search tasks such as assessing resumes, have long been done by software.  Interview-giving capability “started taking off last year,” and can customize, based on the answers it gets.  Perhaps AI can also do something decades neglected – telling candidates without being asked when they have been dropped from consideration.

How about “Effortless golf with AI smart caddie that follows you” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, June 26^th)?  Yes, it’s a robot, the Robera Neo, “designed to follow you around the course, carrying your clubs effortlessly and freeing you up to concentrate on your swing.”  Having used “GPS to map out the course,” it requires only sporadic efforts to guide it, and looks like little more than a golf bag on a manual cart.  It costs only about $2,000, and shipping is supposed to start this month.

On the medical front, a “Paralyzed man speaks and sings with AI brain-computer interface” (Kurt Knutsson, Fox News, July 1^st).  “It translates the brain signals that would normally control the muscles used for speech, allowing users to “talk” and even “sing” through a computer, almost instantly.”  It requires “four microelectronic arrays, surgically implanted in the part of the brain responsible for producing speech,” which “pick up the neural activity that happens when someone tries to speak.”  It can also “recreate the user’s own voice, thanks to a voice cloning algorithm trained on recordings made before the onset” of the patient’s medical condition.  “So far, it’s only been tested with one participant,” so it will not be available soon.

Finally, we saw “How A.I. Is Transforming Wedding Planning” (Alix Strauss, The New York Times, July 12^th).  Instead of using new technology, this ChatGPT technique seems to coordinate and focus existing capabilities by determining what weddings would need, starting with “an Excel document listing 200 suggestions, including ideas from blog posts, Reddit and Google Crowdsource.”  It does a wide range of work on this project, including choosing and communicating with vendors, creating a seating chart “taking into account guests’ commonalities and family dynamics (!),” and providing ideas for the likes of “designs, layouts, and types of tables.”  This is all sort of a combination of a good wedding-planning book and ability to do individual tasks, with more sophistication than a program could have done, say, ten years ago.  And it will only get better.

What can we say about these 11 AI accomplishments?  They are a mixture of solid proofs of concept needing fleshing out, in-progress functionalities, and groupings of previously known skills.  They are heaviest in the medical field, and close in other technical areas.  Interestingly, as AI has been thought of primarily as an office and writing tool, it has had the least unqualified success with that.  We should all hope that its penchants for deceit and hallucinations will not find their ways into the likes of the brain-to-speech application above.  Maybe when it creates ideas, instead of implementing them, it is at its best.  Some smart people are like that, so it is fitting that this artificial but sometimes massively strong intelligence, the most extreme form of idiot-savantism we have seen, is that way too.  We still know precious little about how AI will turn out for humanity, and in which ways.  All we can do is to keep working and, with open minds, keep understanding.