Radar Trends to Watch: June 2022

Developments in Programming, Metaverse, Hardware, and More

By Mike Loukides

June 1, 2022

The explosion of large models continues. Several developments are especially noteworthy. DeepMind’s Gato model is unique in that it’s a single model that’s trained for over 600 different tasks; whether or not it’s a step towards general intelligence (the ensuing debate may be more important than the model itself), it’s an impressive achievement. Google Brain’s Imagen creates photorealistic images that are impressive, even after you’ve seen what DALL-E 2 can do. And Allen AI’s Macaw (surely an allusion to Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru’s Stochastic Parrots paper) is open source, one tenth the size of GPT-3, and claims to be more accurate. Facebook/Meta is also releasing an open source large language model, including the model’s training log, which records in detail the work required to train it.

Artificial Intelligence

• Is thinking of autonomous vehicles as AI systems rather than as robots the next step forward? A new wave of startups is trying techniques such as reinforcement learning to train AVs to drive safely.
• Generative Flow Networks may be the next major step in building better AI systems.
• The ethics of building AI bots that mimic real dead people seems like an academic question, until someone does it: using GPT-3, a developer created a bot based on his deceased fiancée. OpenAI objected, stating that building such a bot was a violation of its terms ...