How Artificial Intelligence Ran Up the Score the Past Ten Weeks in Its Own Unexpected Way

Behind the news of growing general dislike, gargantuan amounts of debt, and plummeting data center acceptance, AI has been accomplishing a lot. 

First, “How A.I. Might Change the Way Doctors Think” (Helen Ouyang, The New York Times, July 1^st).  One change is taking over the “clinical note,” which physicians have long written to document patient interactions and prospects, and, without expensive doctor’s time, “eavesdropping” and creating organized and clear information packages designed for reference on the patient’s electronic chart.  That is especially valuable when someone is moved from one physician to another, meaning minimal need to filter what the receiving one sees through the biases of the first.  Although this capability will have unknown and not always positive effects on how medical students learn to think, the efficiency gains are great.

In a lower-labor-cost setting, “Taco Bell Ramps Up Voice AI Use Across Nearly 900 Drive-Thrus” (Eric Revell, Fox Business, July 8^th).  The platform, using speech recognition instead of speaking itself, “helps automate the ordering process when a customer pulls up to a drive-thru speaker and is capable of adapting to an individual location’s menu, real-time stocking levels, as well as limited-time offers that are available, which can make the ordering process more consistent and efficient for customers.”  Transaction speed “is on a par with, and in some cases faster than traditional ordering methods.”

Back to medicine, a “Johns Hopkins surgeon highlights AI breakthrough that could spot pancreatic cancer before doctors” (Arabella Bennett, Fox Business, July 20^th).  “Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing cancer care, with researchers developing tools that could help identify some of the deadliest cancers much earlier than doctors can on their own.”  The technology is “helping researchers recognize patterns that would otherwise take physicians decades of experience to identify,” which means earlier detection and therefore many saved lives.

We have read about AI systems becoming “employees,” with varying degrees of success, but how about using them to simulate actual people?  In “To Know What Your Customers Think, Just Ask Their A.I. Twins” (The New York Times, July 30^th), Sri Muppidi described the work of “Simile, a year-old start-up,” which claims it “can predict human behavior by tapping into its growing database of A.I. agents” to get information “faster and cheaper than by running traditional market research studies.”  The company’s head of product says its “responses are now between 85 percent and 99 percent accurate, depending on the scenario and the population surveyed.”  Simile has competitors, but it also has large customers and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.

One kind of virus is more akin to AI, but, in “This A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature” (The New York Times, August 6^th), author Carl Zimmer told us about its work with the other.  When “scientists trained artificial intelligence on libraries of DNA and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes,” “sixteen of them were viable, yielding new viruses.”  When “researchers followed those recipes to create DNA molecules, which they inserted into bacteria,” the result was “viruses never seen in nature,” which could “infect other bacteria.”  The work was made possible through the software understanding DNA’s sequencing rules, “strikingly similar to a book in some ways” and thus well suited, when “trained… on genetic sequences drawn from millions of animals, plants, microbes and viruses” for large language models.  If it can be contained and not used for biological warfare, this ability could have many applications.

Staying in the same general area, which has seen more accomplishments than any other, “A.I. Is Finding Sperm Where Doctors Couldn’t” (Andrew Zaleski, again in the Times, August 11^th).  A fertility center director compared AI’s effectiveness at this task with seeing stars with a telescope instead of with a naked eye.  Specifically, men who seemingly have none at all may have “several “hidden” sperm” which cannot be seen by microscope users, and which can be “captured” and possibly used for fertilization.

The closest I have seen to AI bringing down an entire field was the subject of “As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution” (Siobhan Roberts, The New York Times, June 2^nd).  Then, there were “A.I. models… making headlines with successful results in research-level mathematics,” along with “a flood of plausible seeming A.I.-generated papers and proofs that have turned out to be incorrect, and in ways that are difficult for mathematicians to discern.”  That precipitated “the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics,” which along with bad articles condemns not “keeping the field’s best interests in mind,” and attempts to preserve “the cultivation of ideas, understanding, judgment, and human insight.”  When asked if “the declaration might be seen as mathematics embarking on a futile effort - circling the wagons in order to save an outdated profession that A.I. is threatening with obsolescence,” Roberts’ panel made it plain that that is indeed the case.  Indeed, “OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math’s ‘Millennium Problems’” (Cade Metz, once more in the Times, September 8^th), “another clear sign that A.I. is fundamentally changing the upper reaches of mathematics, which have long been viewed as a pinnacle of human achievement.”  Even though they have no chance of catching up to the best machines, there are still devoted chess experts - look for mathematicians to occupy the same spot.

Do you want more successes?  There are plenty more in “AI isn’t just a problem, it’s a solution.  Some people are already making the most of it” (Fox News, August 18^th).  In the last two printed pages. Len Khodorkovsky mentioned therapy and companionship, organizing lives, finding a purpose, medication and appointment schedules, job searching, advice for new businesses, and support for “democratic values.”  More and more things helping people in a variety of ways.  Could it be that “the real AI story isn’t about machines becoming omnipotent.  It’s humans becoming more capable”?  That’s truly one of the stories, and not the main one we anticipated.  It is not to pooh-pooh.  It is in place, it is valuable, and it is growing.  Now.