The technological and legal challenges facing artificial intelligence

A.I. capabilities will soar. It’s hard to know when that tipping point might arrive. Jensen Huang, the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, whose dominance of A.I. chips has seen its share price more than triple since Jan. 1, told the DealBook Summit in late November that “there’s a whole bunch of things that we can’t do yet.”

Khosla believes the key A.I. breakthrough in 2024 will be “reasoning,” allowing machines to produce far more accurate results, and that in 2025, “A.I. will win in reasoning against intelligent members of the community.” A.I. machines will be steadily more capable of working through several logical steps, and performing probabilistic thinking, such as identifying a disease based on specific data, Khosla said.

Exponential growth in computational power, which hugely increases the capability of A.I. machines, factors into those predictions. “In 2024, it will be between 10 and 100 times more than current-day models,” Clifford said. “We don’t actually know what kind of innovations that’s going to result in.”

One new tool could be generative audio that allows users to deliver speeches in, say, Biden’s voice or to generate rap songs, opera or Beethoven’s nonexistent 10th symphony. DeepMind and YouTube have partnered with musicians to create A.I. tools allowing artists to insert instruments, transform musical styles or compose a melody from scratch.

Billions in investments will be needed. None of this will come cheap, and the question now is which companies will be able to build truly sustainable A.I. businesses. Of 175,072 A.I. patents filed between 2012 and 2022, more than half were filed in the last three years, according to Deutsche Bank. In 2024 and 2025, the bank predicts sharp increases in companies using A.I. for human resources, marketing, sales and product development. That is already happening: Legal firms, for example, have begun using A.I.-generated contracts, cutting out hours of work for lawyers. “The time is ripe for an explosion of A.I. innovation,” it predicted last May.