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The recent hype over AI is much like the same fever that had fuelled crypto, when once you could slap 'blockchain' on the name of any company and see its stock soar fourfold.

Martin Meissner/The Associated Press

Amid all the hoo-ha over artificial intelligence this year, Microsoft Corp. MSFT-Q, which has a stake in the laboratory behind the ChatGPT bot, has seen its shares go up more than 25 per cent.

Various AI stocks, with names youve never heard of, are hotter than hot, even with a recession looming and at the foot of a tech beatdown in the markets. BigBear.ai Holdings Inc., an information-technology services company, is up about 250 per cent on the year; at one point in February, it was up 700 per cent.

Wanna make money? Boy, do I have a great idea for you. Just add AI to the name of your company. Theres a voice-recognition company that used to be called SoundHound Inc., but went public in 2022 as SoundHound AI Inc. SOUN-Q. The stock has admittedly pared back some gains since then, but it is still up nearly 100 per cent for the year.

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Any of this sound familiar? Its the same fever that had fuelled crypto, when once you could slap blockchain on the name of any company and see its stock soar fourfold. Im pretty sure that soon, as with crypto, the term AI bro will enter the lexicon to describe a young man who is passionate and enthusiastic about the industry.

Oh, wait it has. An Urban Dictionary entry for AI bro was made in January of this year.

Will AI take over the world? And other questions Canadians are asking Google about the technology

Lets face it, AI is the new crypto. All the hype, investment mania and scams of past years investment cycles are going to come back.

To that, you might slam your table, squint your eye around your monocle and say: Wait thats not right! At least AI does something. Crypto is just make-believe money!

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A commonly expressed view. And a wrong one. But lets for the sake of argument say that it is correct. Has that distinction resulted in any difference in the markets?

It wasnt just 2020, the year of the really expensive digital pictures, or NFTs, that crypto was booming. Remember 2017, when a market frenzy was sparked by the Canadian-founded Ethereum, which let anyone easily create their own coin?

At one point that year, the furniture chain Ethan Allen Interiors Inc. ETD-N was up 50 per cent, largely attributed to how its ticker at the time, ETH, was the same as the abbreviation for Ethereums ether coin.

While Ethan Allen eventually changed its ticker to distance itself, others fiercely coveted that nominal crypto association.

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I wasnt being hyperbolic when I wrote earlier that companies can slap blockchain onto their names and see their stock quadruple in value. That was exactly what happened when Long Island Iced Tea Corp. changed its named to Long Blockchain Corp.

Meanwhile, Eastman Kodak Co. KODK-N, the camera maker, saw its stock triple in value after a bad year by announcing it would go into crypto mining.

Then there were the outright scams. The infamous OneCoin raised US$4-billion, but there is no evidence it had even developed a digital currency based on blockchain technology. Such scams are so plentiful that the U.S. Justice Department is still announcing new 2017-era cases to this day.

Such scams abounded because they were easy. Regardless of what many think of it, there are defined metrics for what makes a cryptocurrency namely in terms of the code that goes into it. But people cant see or hold a cryptocurrency. So, its easy to claim youve made one. The end user doesnt always have the sophistication to tell the difference until its too late.

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Again sounds familiar? Have you ever wondered how many purported AI projects are actually AI?

A London-based startup, Engineer.ai, once claimed to use artificial intelligence to help people build apps. It attracted US$30-million from investors, including a unit of Japans SoftBank Group Corp. SFTBY. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Engineer.ais AI claims were greatly exaggerated actual humans in India were building the apps.

Such practices are so rampant, there is even a neologism coined for it: AI washing.

What it all boils down to is this: When crypto entered the mainstream, it was hard to define or even understand. In that messy environment, companies thrived and empires were built and so also rose the scams and OneCoins of the world. AI is having the same moment now.

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Opinion: Let's face it, artificial intelligence is becoming the new ... - The Globe and Mail

Shows dont come timelier than Class of 09, an eight-part FX on Hulu drama, premiering May 10, that concerns the potential benefits and pitfalls of artificial intelligenceincluding the moral questions it raises and the ramifications it may have on the human workforce. Arriving as companies such as IBM are opting to not hire new workers for positions that will be replaced by A.I. in the coming few years, its a limited series with its finger so firmly and urgently on the pulse of our present (and future) reality that its fiction plays not as pure make-believe but, rather, as a vision of a possible tomorrow.

Better yet, Tom Rob Smiths show has more going for it than just prescience. Set during a trio of time periods, it focuses on four individuals struggling to figure out (and define) who they are while simultaneously navigating a law enforcement system dedicated to identifying threats to the public. A

ll three of these strands are intertwined in various narrative and thematic ways, highlighting the ethical and practical dilemmas that drove characters to embark on their respective courses, and exposing the fundamental means by which the personal affects the professionaland, as a result, the national. Inventively conceived and deftly executed, its a crime saga that comes across a modernized, multi-layered spin on Philip K. Dicks (and Steven Spielbergs) Minority Report.

Trifurcated across decades, Class of 09 begins in 2034, with FBI director Tayo Michaels (Brian Tyree Henry) monitoring the country via a wall of monitors whose security camera footage sometimes devolves into oceanic streams of matrix-like data. In order to locate a wanted individual named Amos Garcia (Ral Castillo), Michaels sends Amy Poet (Kate Mara), who has one cybernetic eye and doesnt understand why shes been plucked for this assignment.

What she discovers alongside comrade Murphy (Mrs. Davis Jake McDorman, co-starring in yet another AI-related series) is a bank of screens not unlike those possessed by Michaels, and which eventually cut to a loop of Michaels himself proclaiming, Not only are we now one of the greatest countries on this Earthwe are now also one of the safest.

Garcia is an apparent figure from the FBIs past, and its there that Class of 09 soon travels. In 2009, Poet is a nurse who puts everyone first, but shes convinced to give herself a shot by trying out for the bureau.

At Quantico, she joins a prospective incoming class that includes Miller, a former cog in the corporate machine whos looking to fight injustice, as well as confident Lennix (Brian J. Smith), whose parents view the FBI as a step on his journey to political power, and Hour (Sepideh Moafi), the daughter of persecuted Iranian immigrants who dont understand their daughters decision to channel her MIT-grade intellect into a career with the feds. Smith delineates these characters in quick, acute strokes, and then slowly peels back their layers to bare the hang-ups that have led them to their new career.

We always reveal ourselves, says Miller to an interrogation-room suspectone of many instances in which Class of 09s protagonists articulate this sentiment. The desire to know the self is central to Smiths story, which discloses that Miller doesnt trust people (thanks to a harrowing teenage traffic stop gone awry), Hour dreams of creating an inherently fair system (because it might provide the acceptance she craves as a gay woman), and Poet is a loner who prioritizes others in the same (harmful) manner that her single mother did.

These individual issues are wrapped up in the series fascination with AI, which promises investigators the ability to correlate and analyze data on a heretofore unheard-of scale, albeit at the cost of the vital human input necessary (or is it?) to differentiate between right and wrong, good and evil.

Between 2009 and 2034, Class of 09 situates itself in 2023, with Hour attempting to convince a skeptical establishment that an interconnected criminal database would help agents (rather than render them obsolete), Poet being forced to go undercover to investigate her own (following her triumphant take-down of corrupt Philly cops), and Michaels finding himself in a firefight with Montana domestic terrorists whose cunningly smiling leader Mark Tupirik (Mark Pellegrino) seems to have his sights trained specifically on him.

The threads connecting these comrades befores and afters only slowly become clear, as Smith hopscotches between eras with tantalizing (and generally surefooted) dexterity. Theyre brought to life, moreover, by a cast that skillfully handles both the proceedings action-oriented demands and psychological and Big Picture interests, led by the typically great Henry, whose Michaels has an easygoing charisma that belies his keen perceptiveness and formidable determination. Hes the centerpiece of the show, even if he never unduly overshadows his co-stars.

Smith imagines 2034 society as populated by realistic techno-gadgets and complicated by the consequences of artificial intelligence, whose unparalleled ability to assess information results in the types of predictive precrime measures that formed the basis of Dicks predecessor.

Its a fantasy that feels like its sprung from todays headlines, and its AI-centric material serves as an apt contextual framework for a story thats about the eternal quest to know oneself, others, and the world. From touch screens to domestic automation to the implants that grant Poet and others enhanced interfacing abilitiesthe byproducts of innovation that are also necessitated by grievous injuriesClass of 09 proves to be a science-fiction venture whose latter is inspired by the former.

Since press were only provided with four of the series eight installments, theres no guessing the ultimate destination of Class of 09, which uses its time-jumping conceit to thrill and, additionally, to elucidate new facets of its primary players. In an era when so many overlong TV efforts telegraph their every move, such unpredictability is another feather in Class of 09s cap, and makes one wish that it would continue on even past this season. If not, though, theres still plenty of reason to see it through to its finishwhich, hopefully, wont provide an AI cautionary-tale lesson that hits too close to home.

Liked this review? Sign up to get our weekly See Skip newsletter every Tuesday and find out what new shows and movies are worth watching, and which arent.

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The Artificial Intelligence Future Is Upon Us in 'Class of '09' - The Daily Beast

Artificial intelligence (AI)

UKs outgoing chief scientist urges ministers to get ahead of profound social and economic changes

The new genre of AI could be as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, the governments outgoing chief scientific adviser has said, as he urged Britain to act immediately to prevent huge numbers of people becoming jobless.

Sir Patrick Vallance, who stood down from his advisory role last month, said government should get ahead of the profound social and economic changes that ChatGPT-style, generative AI could usher in.

However, in a wide-ranging final parliamentary hearing that also covered his reflections on the pandemic and the rise of China as a global scientific power, he suggested AI could also have considerable benefits that should not be overlooked.

There will be a big impact on jobs and that impact could be as big as the Industrial Revolution was, Vallance told the Commons science, innovation and technology committee. There will be jobs that can be done by AI, which can either mean a lot of people dont have a job, or a lot of people have jobs that only a human could do.

In the Industrial Revolution the initial effect was a decrease in economic output as people realigned in terms of what the jobs were and then a benefit, he added. We need to get ahead of that.

Vallance called for a national review of which sectors would be most significantly affected so plans could be drawn up to retrain and give people their time back to do [their jobs] differently.

The comments follow an announcement by IBM this week that it is suspending or reducing hiring in jobs such as human resources, with a suggestion that 30% of its back-office roles could be replaced by AI in five years.

Echoing comments by the AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who announced his departure from Google this week, Vallance said the most immediate concern posed by AI was ensuring it did not distort the perception of truth.

He added that there was also a broader question of managing the risk of what happens with these things when they start to do things that you really didnt expect.

Despite these potential existential threats, the technology also presented opportunities, Vallance argued. In medicine, it could be that you get more time with your doctor rather than being pressurised, he said. That could be a good outcome.

We shouldnt view this as all risk, he added. Its already doing amazing things in terms of being able to make medical imaging better. It will make life easier in all sorts of aspects of every day work, in the legal profession. This is going to be incredible important and beneficial.

Vallance, who is now chair of the Natural History Museum, appeared sceptical about the prospect of developing a British version of ChatGPT, dubbed Brit-GPT, which some experts have called for in recent months. In March, the Treasury committed 900m to building a supercomputer to boost sovereign capabilities in this area.

Vallance said the focus for the UKs core national capability should be on understanding the implications of AI models and testing the outputs not on building our own version.

He said: You need to be able to probe them and understand them. I just dont think the idea were going to invent something that rivals what the big companies have already made is very sensible. It sounds like attempts to invent a new internet. I mean, why?

Vallance also implied that a moratorium on AI would not be feasible. Unilaterally falling behind doesnt seem to me to be a sensible approach, he said.

Looking back over his tenure, Vallance said his proudest achievements included helping establish the Covid-19 vaccines taskforce and acting as chief scientific adviser for the Cop26 climate summit.

He said he regretted very clumsy wording about herd immunity that led to misunderstanding and controversy early in the pandemic. In a March 2020 interview, Vallance said the aim was not to suppress the virus completely to build up some degree of herd immunity whilst protecting the most vulnerable.

He told the committee his intention was to reflect that immunity was fundamentally how you end pandemics rather than it being an intended strategy. People get immunity through vaccines and they get immunity through catching infections, he said. Ultimately that is where we have got to.

On the origins of the pandemic, Vallance said by far the most likely explanation was a spillover from bats, and that the available evidence suggested a lab leak was less likely.

Vallance also commented on the UKs position in a shifting geopolitical world, with countries including China in the ascendancy in science and technology. Against this backdrop, he said, it was essential for the UK to remain part of the EUs Horizon programme, pointing out it took the flagship research scheme a decade to get going effectively.

The idea that you can instantly set up something equivalent is flawed, he said. China has huge scale, US has huge scale. There are some parts of science that need scale. You cant replicate that domestically.

He called on the UK government to make changes to its visa scheme, which he said needed to be quick and internationally competitive in order to attract the best scientists. When asked whether the Home Office had responded to his advice on this, Vallance said: I guess the feedback is the action.

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AI could be as transformative as Industrial Revolution - The Guardian

A challenging advertising climate chilled the results for iHeartMedias first quarter of 2023. Company executives say continued advertising softness led to a downsizing of the companys revenue by 3.8% compared to the same period a year prior.

But a story with more long-term implications is the companys eager embrace of artificial intelligence. We plan to use it to its fullest, said Chairman/CEO Bob Pittman, without offering specifics. He said AI could fundamentally change the cost structure of the company.

First quarter consolidated revenue for the company was $811 million, iHeartMedia reported. Of its three reportable segments, the multiplatform group including 850 radio stations saw revenue fall 7% to $529 million compared to Q1 2022. iHeart says broadcast radio brought in revenue of $383 million in the first quarter, down from $415 million in the same period in 2022.

Pittman on Tuesday described an uncertain macroeconomic climate and advertising marketplace for the media company. However, he says there are signs of a recovery in the ad markets over the long term. Our expectation is that it will get better through the year. I think major advertisers were holding back trying to put away some money for the year in Q1. And in terms of categories, auto is doing better.

The first quarter data released by iHeartMedia reveals the challenges of operating a media group in an economy thats facing recessionary fears, Pittman said.

The companys Premiere Networks and Total Traffic and Weather Network (TTWN) saw revenue decline 8.2% in the first quarter compared to YoY, totaling $108 million.

Revenue for the digital audio group climbed 4.3% in the quarter YoY on revenue of $223 million. The focus of the companys digital audio division is podcasting and the iHeart streaming platform. Podcasting revenue was the biggest gainer with revenue of $77 million, a 12% increase from the same quarter a year ago. The audio and media services division reported revenue of $61 million for the quarter ending March 31, 2023. iHeartMedia says revenue for the division, which includes Katz Media Group and RCS, was flat compared to 2022.

iHeartMedias total consolidated revenues continue to shift away from broadcast radio to digital. In Q1 of 2020, the multiplatform group accounted for 81% of the companys revenue, but that divisions revenue has now dropped to 65% of total revenue in the most recent quarter, according to company.

Free cash flow dipped to a negative $133 million, according to the companys filing. The company paid down $20 million of debt during the first quarter of 2023, according to its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but $5.4 billion of total debt remains.

iHeart says it continues aggressively managing the companys expense base, and will embrace artificial intelligence as part of its strategy.

We and every other company are looking at how to use AI. I think AI can fundamentally change the cost structure of the company. Thats the primary value for us. It will turn employees from doing, you know, lots of employees doing rote work, to our employees doing more editing and more of the higher level work, Pittman said on the investor call.

I think well do stuff faster and our costs will be lower. We think AI will be a major productivity enhancer for American businesses and we plan to use it to its fullest.

The company hasnt disclosed any plans to use the technology to create AI DJs, but did previously announce it would use AI to translate some of its podcasts into foreign languages. And this week it announced in a press release it would add Daily Dad Jokes, an AI-generated stand-up comedy show from Klassic Studios to its iHeart Podcast Network.

President, COO and CFO Rich Bressler pointed out the significant cost savings the broadcaster has carved out since the pandemic through its real estate consolidations and workforce reduction.

As a management team we constantly look for efficiencies in the company. We took out $250 million (on an annual basis) as we went to the fourth quarter in 2022. And we have announced another $75 million of cost savings to be realized in 2023, Bressler said. The company will continue to aggressively look to improve its overall capital structure.

The companys capital expenditures for Q1 were $39.2 million compared to $22.6 million in the three months ending March 31, 2022. Capital expenditures during the three months increased primarily due to the timing of real estate payments associated with the drastic reduction in our real estate footprint, iHeartMedia stated in its report.

Bressler says iHeartMedia expects its Q2 consolidated revenues to decline in the mid-single digits. Nonetheless, he believes the company is well positioned to withstand the economic downturn no matter how long it lasts.

In a press release ahead of its quarterly call, Bressler was quoted: While we cant predict when the advertising marketplace will fully recover, we believe that our multiplatform revenues will continue to recover and that our digital audio group revenues will continue to grow throughout 2023. With the benefit of what are expected to be record levels of political spend in 2024, and the annualized impact of the cost reductions we have made over the past six months, in 2024 we expect to resume our growth trajectory that was interrupted by this period of recent advertising softness.

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iHeartMedia Plans to Use Artificial Intelligence to the Fullest - Radio World

When William Shakespeare titled his play Twelfth Night, he also offered up the alternative title of What You Will. Perhaps the initial title appeared too opaque or confusing? Humanitys latest play has been given the title artificial intelligence, but I suggest that we clear up some of the confusion and call it What We Will.

With the appearance of this new technology and its rapidly expanding powers, we are rushing to try to understand what it is we are unleashing. We are well aware it could have a tremendous impact on our society, but this latest discovery does not come from a Michelangelo, Beethoven or an Einstein, the last of which would be able to summarize his new understanding of the universe in one short, simple phrase. Instead, this discovery has emerged from a collection of young perhaps brilliant minds, none of whom fully understand what it is we are dealing with or where we are being led.

I cannot help but dwell on this new phenomenon being labeled both intelligent and artificial, with each of these adjectives depending on the other in a somewhat confusing way. An intelligence that is artificial is essentially reliant on humans to spread it and, eventually, to hide or disguise its artificiality. To compete with our own minds and intelligence, it has to be fully released into the world but also adopted by humans, knowingly or unknowingly. It is a novel entry to an already complex world.

Having been derived from what we call deep machine learning, artificial intelligence is able to digest immense quantities of information and make connections we have not yet made. As such, it could offer us interesting new concepts, identifying patterns we may have missed, and could make a fine assistant for some of our tasks and decision-making. Artificial intelligence could exponentially accelerate research into cures for cancer and other such pioneering applications. It will also help us to automate tasks, while reducing human error, particularly when it comes to repetitive tasks.

This arms race is not unlike the nuclear arms race, and its consequences could be equally damaging

Hassan bin Youssef Yassin

However, artificial intelligence has already started a new technological arms race between world powers, all scrambling to develop its most advanced potential military applications. It is not at all implausible that artificial intelligence could, in the relatively near future, direct wars by identifying targets and dispatching drones, and even developing strategy and rapid countermoves, just as computers today can beat the worlds greatest chess grandmasters with ease.

This arms race is not unlike the nuclear arms race, and its consequences could be equally damaging, leading to a new cold war of wits. What is most confusing about artificial intelligence today is that it is still a guessing game. We know that a massive wave is heading our way, but we do not yet know where, when or how big it will be. As Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, wrote in The Economist last week, we urgently need to regulate AI and new technologies. We need an equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration for new technology, and we need it yesterday, he wrote. Harari also contrasted new technologies such as AI with older technologies that revolutionized our world and our geopolitical realities by reminding us that nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, (but) AI can make exponentially more powerful AI.

We are entering a new field of technological wizardry that is creating a whole new set of challenges for human society, but we cannot let this allow us to forget the many tremendous challenges we are already facing. More than the confusion artificial intelligence has already created, it is also one of those shiny new things that we cannot take our eyes or our minds off. As is our habit, we are again ignoring the more pressing challenges of environmental degradation, poverty, war and hatred that every day reduce our chances of handing over a livable world to our children.

Unfortunately, we do not have much to show for decades of effort to tame our own worst instincts and intelligence

Hassan bin Youssef Yassin

The environment is certainly not artificial; we are destroying it with every passing day, yet we know we cannot survive without it. It is not artificial to realize that we are killing our once-fertile agricultural lands, just as we are killing our oceans, but we know we cannot live only off polluted air and water. Ecosystems around the world are breaking down, as floods, wildfires and hurricanes retaliate to destroy our living spaces. I doubt that artificial intelligence will come to us with a sudden fix before it is too late.

It is warranted for us to wonder how we can regulate as diffuse and confusing a threat as artificial intelligence and other new technologies. Over the past century, we have tried to regulate warfare, we have tried to regulate weapons of mass destruction, but look at us today, embroiled in a new European war that every day threatens to turn into a nuclear-armed confrontation between world powers. Unfortunately, we do not have much to show for decades of effort to tame our own worst instincts and intelligence.

Human discoveries are key to our history and of course they have brought great advances and opportunities for us human beings. But very often they have also come with heavy price tags, as we have discovered with climate change and the destruction of our environment. Earth has unfortunately been exhausted by our greed, hatred and disregard. That is why we must make sure that we shape artificial intelligence as What We Will, because it is our responsibility to ensure that it provides us with real intelligence and not with artifice and even greater confusion.

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If artificial intelligence is intelligent, why is it artificial? - Arab News