Rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and recent turmoil at industry powerhouse OpenAI Inc have brought fresh attention to a key hub of ethics research related to the technology in Montreal, led by Canadian “godfather of AI” Yoshua Bengio.
Bengio — who in 2018 shared the Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their work on deep learning — said that he is worried about the technology leapfrogging human intelligence and capabilities in the not-too-distant future.
The academic said that AI developments are moving at breakneck speed and risk “creating a new species capable of making decisions that harm or even endanger humans.”
Photo: AFP
For some time, Bengio has been warning about companies moving too fast without guardrails, “potentially at the public’s expense.”
It is essential to have “rules that’ll be followed by all companies,” he said.
At a world-first AI summit in the UK early last month, Bengio was tasked with leading a team producing an inaugural report on AI safety.
The aim is to set priorities to inform future work on the security of the cutting-edge technology.
The renowned AI academic has brought together a “critical mass of AI researchers” through his Mila-Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute research institute, located in a former working-class neighborhood of Montreal.
His neighbors include AI research facilities of US tech giants Microsoft Corp, Meta Platforms Inc, IBM Corp and Google.
“This concentration of experts in artificial intelligence, which is greater than anywhere else in the world,” is what attracted Google, said Hugo Larochelle, the hoodie-wearing scientific director of DeepMind, the Silicon Valley giant’s AI subsidiary.
Early on, these researchers began thinking about the future of AI, and consultations with the public and researchers from all disciplines led in 2018 to a global AI charter called the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.
“We knew early on that the scientific community needed to think about the integration of AI into society,” said Guillaume Macaux, The International Observatory on the Societal Impacts of AI and Digital Technology (OBVIA) vice president.
Its 220 researchers advise on government policies and raise public awareness of the possible positive effects and negative impacts of this cutting-edge technology.
Artists too are playing a part in “demystifying AI,” says Sandra Rodriguez, who splits her time making art in Montreal and teaching digital media at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.
Her latest art installation includes a breathtaking futuristic world via a virtual reality (VR) headset, which enables visitors to converse with a bot inspired by US linguist Noam Chomsky.
Voice and text answers to queries appear simultaneously. With the touch of a finger, lists of alternative responses considered by the AI with their associated percentage gradient pop up.
“You quickly realize that it’s actually just an algorithm,” Rodriguez said.
“Montreal is a fantastic playground” for exploring the potential and limits of artificial intelligence, as well as “debating [related] ethical and societal issues,” she said.
Art becomes “necessary more than ever” to invite “a wider public to ask questions about the issues of artificial intelligence which will affect them tomorrow,” Rodriguez said.
Gudeng Precision Industrial Co (家登精密), the sole extreme ultraviolet pod supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電), yesterday said it has trimmed its revenue growth target for this year as US tariffs are likely to depress customer demand and weigh on the whole supply chain. Gudeng’s remarks came after the US on Monday notified 14 countries, including Japan and South Korea, of new tariff rates that are set to take effect on Aug. 1. Taiwan is still negotiating for a rate lower than the 32 percent “reciprocal” tariffs announced by the US in April, which it later postponed to today. The
ELECTRONICS: Strong growth in cloud services and smart consumer electronics offset computing declines, helping the company to maintain sales momentum, Hon Hai said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) on Saturday announced that its sales for last month rose 10 percent year-on-year, driven by strong growth in cloud and networking products amid the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom. The company, also known internationally as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), reported consolidated sales of NT$540.24 billion (US$18.67 billion) for the month, the highest ever for the period, and a 10.09 percent increase from a year earlier, although it was down 12.26 percent from the previous month. Hon Hai, which is Apple Inc’s primary iPhone assembler and makes servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, said its cloud
Video streaming giant Netflix is launching a talent cultivation program in Taiwan aimed at producing high-quality Mandarin content, the company announced in a press release on Thursday. Netflix Chinese language content head Maya Huang (黃怡玫) said that Netflix has long invested in the Taiwanese market, citing the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity launched last year as an example. The fund would continue to dedicate resources to discovering content with the potential to be developed into Chinese-language projects, she added. The financing for the new talent projects seeks to create an ecosystem for content creators and professional development programs, she said. The talent projects
APPRECIATION: The central bank stepped in to stabilize the NT dollar after a surge in foreign institutional investment, triggered by optimism about tariffs and US Fed policy Taiwan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high at the end of last month, as the central bank intervened in the currency market to curb the New Taiwan dollar’s appreciation against the US dollar. Foreign exchange reserves increased by US$5.48 billion from May, reaching an all-time high of US$598.43 billion, the central bank said on Friday. While the central bank did not disclose the scale of its intervention, Department of Foreign Exchange Director-General Eugene Tsai (蔡炯民) said that the currency market remained relatively stable until the middle of last month. However, a shift occurred following the US Federal Reserve’s signal of a
RSS