Gen AI: Can it Deliver on the Productivity Promise?
Bloomberg’s Anurag Rana [left] talks with Anthropic’s Michael Gerstenhaber [center] and Scale AI’s Vijay Karunamurthy, during Bloomberg Intelligence’s conference on “Gen AI: Can it deliver on the productivity promise?”
Large Language Models and Self-Correction
Large language models and other forms of generative artificial intelligence are improving steadily at “self-correction,” opening up the possibilities for new kinds of work they can do, including “agentic AI,” according to the vice president of Anthropic, a leading vendor of AI models.
“It’s getting very good at self-correction, self-reasoning,” said Michael Gerstenhaber, head of API technologies at Anthropic, which makes the Claude family of LLMs that compete with OpenAI’s GPT.
New Use Cases and Task Planning
The most recent models include task planning, such as how to carry out tasks on a computer as a person would; for example, ordering pizza online.
“Planning interstitial steps is something that wasn’t possible yesterday that is possible today,” said Gerstenhaber of such step-by-step task completion.
Scaling Gen AI
Both Gerstenhaber and Scale AI’s Karunamurthy made the case that “scaling” Gen AI — making AI models bigger — is helping to advance such self-correcting neural networks.
“We are definitely seeing more and more scaling of the intelligence,” said Gerstenhaber. “One of the reasons we don’t necessarily think that we’re hitting a wall with planning and reasoning is that we’re just learning right now what are the ways in which planning and reasoning tasks need to be structured so that the models can adapt to a wide variety of new environments they haven’t tried to pass.”
Conclusion
Gerstenhaber’s remarks fly in the face of arguments from AI skeptics that Gen AI, and the rest of AI more broadly, is “hitting a wall,” meaning that the return from each new model generation is getting less and less. However, Anthropic’s approach to scaling Gen AI and enabling new classes of functionality suggests that the technology is still evolving and improving.
FAQs
Q: What is Gen AI?
A: Gen AI refers to the next generation of artificial intelligence that is capable of self-correction, self-reasoning, and planning tasks.
Q: What is the purpose of Gen AI?
A: The purpose of Gen AI is to enable new kinds of work and tasks that were previously impossible with traditional AI models.
Q: Is Gen AI hitting a wall?
A: According to Anthropic’s Michael Gerstenhaber, Gen AI is not hitting a wall, but rather, it is evolving and improving through scaling and enabling new classes of functionality.
Q: What is the future of Gen AI?
A: The future of Gen AI is uncertain, but it is likely to continue to evolve and improve, enabling new kinds of work and tasks that were previously impossible.
