Within the tech business, 2023 was a 12 months of transformation.
Spurred by the success of final 12 months’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 all the things 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 12 months, as you’ll see, most 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 reserve it and as an alternative concentrate on the right here and now. What’s A.I. good for at the moment? 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 imprecise 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 enhancing accessibility by A.I.
Accessibility — the time period for making tech merchandise extra usable by individuals with disabilities — has been an underappreciated space of enchancment this 12 months. A number of latest advances in synthetic intelligence — akin to multimodal A.I. fashions that may interpret photos 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 suggest 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 generally known as Be My AI, powered by OpenAI’s know-how, that permits blind and low-sighted individuals 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 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 susceptible to shedding their skill to talk, akin to these with a latest prognosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or one other degenerative illness, and offers them a method 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 yet another promising accessibility breakthrough: A analysis group on the College of Texas at Austin introduced this 12 months that it had used A.I. to develop a “noninvasive language decoder” that may translate ideas into speech — learn individuals’s minds, basically. 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 Prescription drugs and CRISPR Therapeutics, for placing gene modifying to good use
When CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene modifying instrument, 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 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 permitted the primary gene-editing remedy for people — a remedy for sickle cell illness, known as Exa-cel, that was collectively developed by Vertex Prescription drugs of Boston and CRISPR Therapeutics of Switzerland.
Exa-cel makes use of CRISPR to edit the gene liable for sickle cell, a debilitating blood illness that impacts roughly 100,000 People, most of whom are Black. Whereas it’s nonetheless wildly costly and troublesome to manage, the remedy 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 crucial enjoyable interviews I did on my podcast this 12 months 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 historic papyrus manuscripts generally known as the Herculaneum Scrolls. The scrolls, which belonged to a library owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, had been buried underneath a mountain of ash in 79 A.D. throughout the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They had been so totally 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 12 months, 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 gained. However the competitors sparked a frenzy of curiosity from newbie historical past buffs, and this 12 months a 21-year-old laptop science scholar, Luke Farritor, gained a $40,000 intermediate prize for deciphering a single phrase — “purple” — from one of many scrolls. I like the thought of utilizing A.I. to unlock knowledge from the traditional previous, and I like the public-minded spirit of this competitors.
To Waymo, for taking the gradual highway to self-driving
I spent lots 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 probably the most half I purchase the concept self-driving vehicles 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 latest days, after considered one of its automobiles struck and dragged a girl who had been hit by one other automotive. California regulators stated the corporate had misled them in regards to 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 12 months 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 12 months felt safer and smoother than the Cruise rides I took. And Waymo’s security knowledge is compelling: In keeping with a research the corporate carried out with Swiss Re, an insurance coverage agency, in 3.8 million self-driving miles Waymo’s vehicles had been considerably much less more likely to trigger property injury than human-driven vehicles, and led to no bodily harm claims by any means.
I’ll put my playing cards on the desk: I like self-driving vehicles, and I feel society can be higher off as soon as they’re widespread. However they should be protected, and Waymo’s slow-and-steady strategy 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 stunning — and, to my thoughts, heartening — tech traits of 2023 was seeing governments around the globe become involved in making an attempt to know and regulate A.I.
However all that involvement requires work — and in the US, lots 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 government order on synthetic intelligence, launched in October, designated NIST as one of many main federal companies liable for preserving tabs on A.I. progress and mitigating its dangers. The order directs the company to develop methods of testing A.I. techniques for security, give you 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 individuals and has an annual price range of $1.24 billion, is tiny in contrast with different federal companies doing important security work. (For scale: The Division of Homeland Safety has an annual price range of almost $100 billion.) However 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 companies as a way to give ourselves a preventing probability.
And on that notice: Completely satisfied holidays, and see you subsequent 12 months!
