It’s still January, and there’s already been quite a lot of discourse in and around MIT about the state of technology right now.
Breaking news includes this concern about DeepSeek’s new model and how it affects the U.S. tech industry. There’s also quite a lot of talk about AI models themselves, and how they integrate into our lives. Most of us expect 2025 to be a banner year for artificial intelligence technology.
Here are four aspects of AI that many of our educators and presenters are talking about at MIT events and elsewhere.
The Universality of AI
One of the points that speakers and prisoners keep driving home is that AI is changing all industries and all parts of life. It’s not just one narrow transformation that happens with an innovation like, well, sliced bread, or even the telephone, which was arguably a broad communications upgrade. AI is different in that it is likely to be a universal labor-saver, especially when paired with dexterous robotics.
In these ways, AI is likely to penetrate all of the processes that contribute to enterprise and human relationships. So we can expect this sea change to be rather large and all-encompassing. Contrast it to something like cloud computing, which was transformative to business, but not so disruptive to business as usual every single day, as the technology evolved. It’s one thing to be able to send data off-premises: yes, it can be applied to almost any type of business. But it’s a whole other thing to have technologies able to cogitate and converse like humans. We haven’t yet really plumbed the capabilities of artificial intelligence, and it will undoubtedly take a while.
It’s a good idea for us to think about how we will integrate these technologies into our lives this year, and in the years to come.
Quotes from the recent IIA event:
“AI will influence all aspects of life” – Yossi Matias
“The power of connecting everything…We are at an extraordinary moment in the time of reengagement…The improvement is not just about connecting more data; we want things to work autonomously.” – Cyril Perducat
“We have introduced a creature more powerful than us that competes with us and that has emerging capabilities which designers don’t understand” – Yoshua Bengio and Dawn Song
The Need For Data Ownership
This is another one that’s a big deal for people who are looking at the state of the industry today.
Simply put, it comes down to who owns the data in question. LLMs are trained on human data of some kind. That might be a general survey of the web, or specific proprietary data sets from publishers or other companies. It might even consist of people’s private data – data about how they do their jobs, data about how they shop or live, data about their demographics.
So it’s important that people own their own data. It’s important that the people who own data profit from it, and that information is not just stolen to feed corporate products.
Quotes from the recent IIA event:
“There is a whole new renaissance coming in creativity. It is exciting to be creative at this moment. We are living in the wild, wild west…Who is the sheriff?…We need to protect individuals and creatives…Every person on earth needs to have their data protected, just like credit is.” – Will.i.am
“I want an AI that works for me.” – Tim Berners-lee
The Threat of Job Displacement
Another major concern is the phenomenon of AI taking over from human labor, and costing our societies jobs. We know that there’s always been a push to create jobs in order to keep people employed. Sometimes it seems like that system is breaking down, and we have a serious threat from automation, a threat to our livelihoods. We owe it to ourselves and future generations to think this through, and come up with solutions.
Quotes from the recent IIA event:
“39% of skills or tasks might get automated in the next five years…Every individuals needs to think about how they might get displaced” – Jeremy Werthimer
“AI changes the calculus of global competition…The geopolitical map is being rewritten…Basic AI will be the foundational skills set.” – Keith Strier
“Will we have a large data divide at the same time as we have an energy divide…Can AI left all boats” – Mary de Wysocki
Proceed with Caution
Some of the above points relate to this one, which is that we need to be deliberate about how we integrate AI.
There will be unanticipated side effects of putting these technologies in place anywhere in the business world, or in our personal lives. We have to be cognizant of how AI works, and think about how to interact with it in the most healthy and positive ways.
Quotes from the recent IIA event:
“It is a critical mistake to trade your cognitive capital for cheap goods and services.” “The scale economies of search are clear…You can never catch someone who is running. We need to move at the rate of calculus not algebra.” – John Sviokia
“I am a cautious optimist if we have enough time. I worry about competitive race dynamics which compress the time and focus less resources on safety…Colleagues who say there is nothing to worry about are insane…We are entering an agentic era—building agents is a threshold moment for the system becoming more risky.” – Demis Hassabis
Those are some of the main points that I’ve heard talked about as we move into a new year. Look for more while I am involved in bringing you news from the MIT community and the AI industry as a whole.
