This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology.
But it’s high time we talk about another player: Africa.
As MIT Technology Review has written before, AI is creating a new colonial world order, where the technology is enriching a small minority of people at the expense of the rest of the world.
African AI researchers are determined to change that. They’re forging their own path, developing tools that answer the needs of Africans, in their own languages.
However, they face many barriers. AI research is eye-wateringly expensive, and African startups and researchers get a fraction of the funding their Western or Asian counterparts get. They have to innovate and rely on open source to do more with less.
Despite that, the African AI story is not only a story of persistence and innovation, but of preserving cultures and fighting to shape how AI technologies are used on their own continent. Read more here from Abdullahi Tsanni, who went to this year’s Deep Learning Indaba, a machine learning conference held annually in Senegal, to learn about the opportunities and barriers the African AI scene faces.
And then some personal news! This edition will be my last newsletter, and from next week you’ll be in the extremely capable hands of my colleague James O’Donnell. It’s been a delight writing this newsletter for the past two or so years, and I’m so grateful you’ve joined me on this journey covering everything from snowballs of bullshit to Taylor Swift’s deepfakes. I’m not going anywhere though. I’ll be diving deeper into the AI beat to bring you stories on what’s happening in AI and how the technology is changing us and our societies. Stay tuned for more!
Finally, while I have you, this week we’re running our biggest sale of the year, with 50% off on an annual subscription of MIT Technology Review. New subscribers receive a free digital report on Generative AI and the future of work. Subscribe here.
Now read the rest of The Algorithm
Deeper Learning
Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch
Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics. Those expectations have been especially high in physics and chemistry, where the weird effects of quantum mechanics come into play. In theory, this is where quantum computers could have a huge advantage over conventional machines.
Enter AI: But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental physics, chemistry, and materials science in a way that suggests quantum computing’s purported home turf might not be so safe after all.
Given the pace of recent advances, a growing number of researchers are now asking whether AI could solve a substantial chunk of the most interesting problems in chemistry and materials science before large-scale quantum computers become a reality. Read more from Edd Gent here.
Bits and Bytes
The Saudis are planning a $100 billion AI powerhouse
Speaking of the race for AI dominance, this piece looks at how Saudi Arabia wants in on AI action. And it’s putting its money where its mouth is. The country is investing a massive sum to develop a tech hub that it hopes will rival the neighboring United Arab Emirates. (Bloomberg)
AI is making it harder to believe what is real and what is not
Two recent examples show just how influential AI slop can be in warping our sense of reality. In Dublin, crowds gathered in the city center to wait for a Halloween parade to take place. There was no parade planned, but the listing was created by AI and then picked up by social media users and local media. By way of contrast, some social media users dismissed shocking images of the devastating recent floods in Spain as AI-generated, despite them being entirely real.
AI companies are getting comfortable offering their technology to the military
Militaries around the world have been pouring money into new technologies, including AI. Meta and Anthropic are the latest tech companies to start courting them, joining the likes of Google and OpenAI. (The Washington Post)
OpenAI is shifting its strategy as the improvement in its AI tools slows down
The current paradigm in AI development is to make things bigger to make them better. But OpenAI’s new model, code-named Orion, only performs slightly better than its predecessors. Instead, OpenAI is shifting to improving models after their initial training. (The Information)