“We have entered the Intelligence Age,” proclaimed Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, in September. “Deep learning worked,” he explained, and this breakthrough in learning from data will unleash a smart era in which the more data becomes available, “the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems”.
Altman joins other thought leaders, corporations like Google and Amazon, and organisations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, in pinning humanity’s hopes on better information.
The logic is enticing. By harvesting all the world’s knowledge, AI models can locate patterns, make correlations, and offer data-driven “insights”. The optimal solutions to our biggest problems are needles in a data haystack, so finding them exceeds the limited human mind. It is up to technology like deep learning to “capture it all”, analyse or train on it – and then offer up the brilliant game-changing idea or most rational response.
