Why Bill Gates believes AI superintelligence will require some self-awareness
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
This week, I’m focusing on “metacognition,” or an AI model’s ability to understand its abilities and think about how to use them. I also look at how the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision could affect AI regulations, and at Figma’s AI copying woes.
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Bill Gates says “metacognition” is AI’s next frontier
Reporting on and writing about AI has given me a whole new appreciation of how flat-out amazing our human brains are. While large language models (LLMs) are impressive, they lack whole dimensions of thought that we humans take for granted. Bill Gates hit on this idea last week on the Next Big Idea Club podcast. Speaking to host Rufus Griscom, Gates talked at length about “metacognition,” which refers to a system that can think about its own thinking. Gate defined metacognition as the ability to “think about a problem in a broad sense and step back and say, Okay, how important is this to answer? How could I check my answer, and what external tools would help me with this?”
The Microsoft founder said the overall “cognitive strategy” of existing LLMs like GPT-4 or Llama was still lacking in sophistication. “It’s just generating through constant computation each token and sequence, and it’s mind-blowing that that works at all,” Gates said.
Click here to read more about metacognition.
How the Supreme Court’s landmark Chevron ruling will affect tech and AI
The implications of the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision Friday are becoming clearer this week, including what it means for the future of AI. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the court reversed the “Chevron Doctrine, which required courts to respect federal agencies’ (reasonable) interpretations of regulations that don’t directly address the issue at the center of a dispute. In essence, SCOTUS decided that the judiciary is better equipped (and perhaps less politically motivated) than executive branch agencies to fill in the legal ambiguities of laws passed by Congress. There may be some truth to that, but the counter-argument is that the agencies have years of subject matter and industry expertise, which enables them to interpret the intentions of Congress and settle disputes more effectively.
As Axios’s Scott Rosenberg points out, the removal of the Chevron Doctrine may make passing meaningful federal AI regulation much harder. Chevron allowed Congress to define regulations as sets of general directives, and left it to the experts at the agencies to define the specific rules and settle disputes on a case-by-case basis at the implementation and enforcement level. Now, it’ll be on Congress to hash out the fine points of the law in advance, doing their best to anticipate disputes that might arise in the future.
Click here to read more about how the Chevron ruling will impact AI regulation.
Figma’s new AI feature appears to have reproduced Apple designs
The design app maker Figma has temporarily disabled its newly launched “Make Design” feature after a user found that the tool generates weather app UX designs that look strikingly similar to that of Apple’s Weather app. Such close copying by generative AI models often suggests that the AI’s training data was thin in a particular area causing it to rely too heavily on a single, recognizable piece of training data, in this case Apple’s designs.
Click here to read more about Figma’s AI snafu.
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