Artificial Intelligence

DeepMind has developed the world’s first tabula rasa algorithm, AlphaGo Zero, which learns from scratch without relying on human expertise or existing data. Unlike previous AI models, it learns through self-play, achieving mastery in the game of Go and uncovering novel strategies. This approach could revolutionize areas like genomic research and law, reducing concerns about privacy and human bias in algorithmic decision-making, and possibly leading to true artificial general intelligence.

Law firms struggle with partner compensation models, balancing profit and collaboration. The “eat-what-you-kill” model, based on individual revenue generation, can lead to competition and reduced cooperation. In contrast, the lockstep system, rewarding tenure over performance, may not fully incentivize productivity. Similar challenges exist in finance, where hedge funds guard proprietary data. Numerai, an AI firm, addresses this by using homomorphic encryption and a public platform, allowing data scientists to contribute to a meta-model, democratizing data without compromising confidentiality, and rewarding contributions with bitcoin. This innovative approach could inspire similar solutions in the legal industry.

We should regulate autonomous weapons like we govern nuclear non-proliferation and climate change - through international consensus and not national policy. If we build machine intelligence that can decide who to kill this technology we will not be able to control whose hands this gets into.