How has the development of AI changed over the last five years? And how do you think it will change in the next five, ten, or fifteen years?

We’re on what is clearly an exponential curve in terms of the capabilities of this technology, but the challenge of an exponential curve is that the human mind doesn’t really understand it. It’s really hard for us to understand something that gets twice as good every year. But you can look back and observe the capabilities of the technology in, say, recognizing what’s in an image. If you go back ten years, it was barely at the level of, “oh, I think I see a dog.” The technology we have today can not only write an entire story about what’s in an image, but can even generate an image based on a verbal description. So we can say: “Could you make the dog jump higher, be furrier, be friendlier?” with all

sorts of qualitative descriptors, and the machine will generate something that looks real. Because this is an exponential curve, it’s very difficult to foresee even two to three years ahead, let alone ten years ahead.

What is the potential you see in using AI as a tool for accessibility to something like arts, education, or healthcare?

Those are quite different use cases.
If I had to generalize, I would say that those are going to be transformative to accessibility but in different ways. In the arts, if you think about someone who is, for example, visually impaired and having the computer be able to describe what is being perceived in ways that anyone can understand, or conversely, if you’re someone who’s hard of hearing, you can make a piece of music and create visual imagery that’s evocative of what’s being played, which I think is incredibly exciting. In education, I think that this is going to be a truly transformative capability. There’s a study by Benjamin Bloom from 40 years ago called “the two sigma problem,” where he showed that a student who has access to a private tutor performs two standard deviations better than a student who’s in a standard classroom. The problem is that we’ve never had the ability economically to provide a private tutor to every student, but now we can. So there’s the opportunity to take kids who are basically performing at median or even far below the median and “up level” them in a way that would not have been imaginable without this technology.