Dec 27, 2023

The Batch AI News and Insights: AI is progressing faster than ever. This is thrilling, yet rapid change can be disorienting. In such times, it’s useful to follow Jeff Bezos’ advice to think about not only what is changing but also what will stay the same.

AI is progressing faster than ever. This is thrilling, yet rapid change can be disorienting. In such times, it’s useful to follow Jeff Bezos’ advice to think about not only what is changing but also what will stay the same.

Without question, 2023 has been the most exciting and interesting year in technology that I’ve seen over a fairly long career. It bears mention that I’m pretty sure I said more or less the same thing at the close of 2022...

One of my favourite flavours of conversation is listening to reinforcement learning experts talk about their children as reinforcement learning agents. These conversations highlight just how comically far behind humans our machine learning models are.

Before this past year, when I told people I worked in AI, more often than not I was met with a blank stare and sometimes a question along the lines of: “You mean like robots?”

Only a year ago, ChatGPT woke the world up to the power of foundation models. But this power is not about shiny, jaw-dropping demos.

The past year has seen incredible innovation in AI, and I expect as much or more in 2024. The coming year undoubtedly will be a year of rapid progress in models – multimodal, multilingual, and (hopefully) smaller and faster.

The year 2023 was an inflection point in the development of broadly useful AI systems across text, image, video, audio, and other modalities. At Runway alone, we saw the release of video-generation models such as Gen-1 and Gen-2...