The Missing Link Of The AI Safety ConversationAI NEWS

In light of recent events with OpenAI, the conversation on AI development has morphed into one of acceleration versus deceleration and the alignment of AI tools with humanity.

The AI safety conversation has also quickly become dominated by a futuristic and philosophical debate: Should we approach artificial general intelligence (AGI), where AI will become advanced enough to perform any task the way a human could? Is that even possible?

While that aspect of the discussion is important, it is incomplete if we fail to address one of AI’s core challenges: It’s incredibly expensive.

AI needs talent, data, scalability
The internet revolution had an equalizing effect as software was available to the masses and the barriers to entry were skills. These barriers got lower over time with evolving tooling, new programming languages and the cloud.

When it comes to AI and its recent advancements, however, we have to realize that most of the gains have so far been made by adding more scale, which requires more computing power. We have not reached a plateau here, hence the billions of dollars that the software giants are throwing at acquiring more GPUs and optimizing computers.

To build intelligence, you need talent, data and scalable compute. The demand for the latter is growing exponentially, meaning that AI has very quickly become the game for the few who have access to these resources. Most countries cannot afford to be a part of the conversation in a meaningful way, let alone individuals and companies. The costs are not just from training these models, but deploying them too.

Democratizing AI
According to Coatue’s recent research, the demand for GPUs is only just beginning. The investment firm is predicting that the shortage may even stress our power grid. The increasing usage of GPUs will also mean higher server costs. Imagine a world where everything we are seeing now in terms of the capabilities of these systems is the worst they are ever going to be. They are only going to get more and more powerful, and unless we find solutions, they will become more and more resource-intensive.

With AI, only the companies with the financial means to build models and capabilities can do so, and we have only had a glimpse of the pitfalls of this scenario. To truly promote AI safety, we need to democratize it. Only then can we implement the appropriate guardrails and maximize AI’s positive impact.