The surge of money flooding into artificial intelligence has resulted in some crypto-like hype that is obscuring the incredible scientific progress in the field, according to Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. The chief executive of Google’s AI research division told the Financial Times that the billions of dollars being poured into generative AI start-ups and products “brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype and maybe some grifting and some other things that you see in other hyped-up areas, crypto or whatever. “Some of that has now spilled over into AI, which I think is a bit unfortunate. And it clouds the science and the research, which is phenomenal,” he added. “In a way, AI’s not hyped enough but in some senses it’s too hyped. We’re talking about all sorts of things that are just not real.” The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022 sparked an investor frenzy as start-ups raced to develop and deploy generative AI and attract venture capital funding. VC groups invested $42.5bn in 2,500 AI start-up equity rounds last year, according to market analysts CB Insights. Public market investors have also rushed into the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet and Nvidia, that are spearheading the AI revolution. Their rise has helped to propel global stock markets to their strongest first-quarter performance in five years. But regulators are already scrutinising companies for making false AI-related claims. “One shouldn’t greenwash and one shouldn’t AI wash,” said Gary Gensler, chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, in December. In spite of some of the misleading hype about AI, Hassabis, who last week received a knighthood for services to science, said he remained convinced that the technology was one of the most transformative inventions in human history. “I think we’re only scratching the surface of what I believe is going to be possible over the next decade-plus,” he said. “We’re at the beginning, maybe, of a new golden era of scientific discovery, a new Renaissance.” The best proof of concept for how AI could accelerate scientific research, he said, was DeepMind’s AlphaFold model, released in 2021.
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