Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

by Ethan Mollick

we now find ourselves in an era when AI, like me, can generate contextually rich content, showcasing the remarkable evolution of machine comprehension and expression. (And, yes, that last sentence was AI-produced text—a big difference from the Markov chain!)

and they tell the AI how likely different words or parts of words are to appear together or in a certain order. The original ChatGPT had 175 billion weights, encoding the connection between words and parts of words. No one programmed these weights; instead, they are learned by the AI itself during its training.

The weights now reflect meaningful connections between words and phrases, and the apprentice has transformed into a master chef.

The end of human dominance need not be the end of humanity. It may even be a better world for us, but it is no longer a world where humans are at the top, ending a good two-million-year run. Achieving this level of machine intelligence means that AIs, not humans, are in charge.

We have to hope they are properly aligned to human interests.

We need to do more than hope. Now is the time to work toward ensuring safety for both humans and the machines by engaging in dialogue--including the machines.

alien as AIs are, they’re also deeply human. They are trained on our cultural history, and reinforcement learning from humans aligns them to our goals. They carry our biases and are created out of a complex mix of idealism, entrepreneurial spirit, and, yes, exploitation of the work and labor of others.