This Week's Most Read: Gemini's Image Flaws, Protecting Your Job from AI

Here are this week's top trending stories:

1. Google DeepMind CEO Defends Gemini's Image Flaws - MWC 2024

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said Gemini's image generation gaff was the result of good intentions being applied “too bluntly."

Last week, users of Gemini - Google's most powerful multimodal model - discovered that it created images of people of color holding historically white positions, such as a Latino founding father. Google then halted Gemini's ability to generate images of people as accusations of the company being 'woke' appeared in social media.

At a fireside chat at Mobile World Congress, Hassabis said that the feature is being fixed and will be back online “in a very short order, next couple of weeks.”

Hassabis said Google built Gemini to cater to its global user base and produce images of people from various backgrounds. While Google was “well-intended” in wishing to portray a diverse global audience, Hassabis acknowledged that it “was not working quite the way we intended it to work.”

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2. Deloitte: How to Prevent AI from Taking Your Job

Workers, it can be said, have a love-hate relationship with AI: It can make the routine parts of their jobs easier but it also has the potential to replace them.

AI Business recently sat down with David Mallon, managing director at Deloitte Consulting, to discuss the impact of AI on jobs and ways in which white-collar employees can avoid being replaced by AI.

Mallon said that while AI is causing workers anxiety, it is also providing productivity increases.

"The best way to avoid being disrupted by AI is to figure out how to use AI to reinvent what you do. If you are on the forefront of re-authoring your own job, you have increased the likelihood that you are going to be just fine no matter how this plays out."

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3. How Telcos are Using Generative AI - MWC 2024

As generative AI has emerged, businesses quickly pivoted to showcase this new capability in their strategies – and telcos were no different. For Verizon and Nordic-based provider Telia, key focal points were managing ever-increasing volumes of data and fostering employee comfort with this emerging technology.

Speaking at Mobile World Congress 2024, Rainer Deutschmann, Telia’s group chief operating officer, said businesses should build a solid data foundation to truly unlock the power of generative AI.

Deutschmann explained that the foundation for generative AI at Telia included having a data lake with common data sources integrated into the lake. That foundation also relates to people – ensuring staff are ready to manage the changes that generative AI can bring, including improving their productivity workloads.

“Build the foundation, but then you can unlock the power of the Gen AI a lot better than trying to do the Gen AI as a leapfrog and all of a sudden you will realize that the foundation is missing, so it has to go hand in hand,” Deutschmann said.

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4. Google DeepMind CEO on AGI, OpenAI and Beyond – MWC 2024

In 2010, Demis Hassabis co-founded what would become one of the most influential AI labs in the world: DeepMind, named after the term deep learning. The company, which Google acquired in 2014, had grand designs for building artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

How is that endeavor going?

“It is looking like it is going to be a more gradual process rather than a step function,” he said during a keynote fireside chat at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. Today’s AI systems are becoming “incrementally more powerful” as compute, techniques and data used are scaled up.

It is possible that significant advances can come in the next few years with new innovations to improve AI’s ability to plan, remember and use tools – things current-generation AI systems are missing. In the meantime, AI advances are proving to be useful already in many other endeavors.

The CEO defines AGI as a system that can perform almost any cognitive task that humans can. He said there is a need for a human reference point is because the human brain “is the only … proof we have maybe in the universe that general intelligence is possible.”

But how will we know AGI when we see it? It is a question hotly debated in the field of AI. For Hassabis, it either may be obvious when it appears or may require considerable tests to determine.

“One way is to actually test the systems on thousands and thousands of tasks that humans do and see if it passes a certain threshold on all of those tasks. And the more tasks you put into that test set, the more sure you can be you have the general space covered.”

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5. Lenovo's Transparent Display Laptop and AI PCs – MWC 2024

At Mobile World Congress 2024, PC giant Lenovo took the wraps off a laptop with a transparent display that it said would lead to new ways of working.

The proof-of-concept ThinkBook laptop has a 17.3-inch Micro-LED transparent display that is borderless. It boasts a glass keyboard that doubles as a drawing pad; Lenovo also provides a digital pen for it.

Lenovo said the transparent display lets the user see objects or environments in the real world and overlap digital content on top, which would lead to new use cases for the personal computer.

For example, an artist can see an object behind the laptop pop up on the display and then add digital drawings and other flourishes for a mixed reality use case.

The laptop is not meant to hit the market but to showcase the technologies Lenovo is capable of developing.

But if it were to be sold, Lenovo would give the laptop the ability to turn the display opaque, said Tom Butler, executive director of commercial notebook portfolio at Lenovo, in an interview with AI Business.

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