5 questions for Francesco Marconi

Presented by CTIA – The Wireless Association: How the next wave of technology is upending the global economy and its power structures

Oct 27, 2023 View in browser   By Mohar Chatterjee and Derek Robertson Presented by CTIA – The Wireless Association Hello, and welcome to this week’s edition of The Future in Five Questions. This week we interviewed Francesco Marconi, a self-described “computational journalist” and founder of the company Applied XL, which uses AI-powered news analytics tools to monitor clinical trials and drug risks. Marconi wrote the 2020 book “Newsmakers: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism,” and discussed with us his seemingly counterintuitive idea that the technology will be a massive boon to news media, as well as the limitations of large language models and his gratitude for the quality of data in the United States. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea right now? The news industry has yet to fully realize the tremendous impact that AI will have in the sector. My area of focus is twofold: It's the idea of being able to expand news coverage, and at the same time, overcoming human capacity limitations. There's this web of data and information surrounding us, not only about our physical spaces, but interactions of individuals, politicians, governments, and companies, that yield a lot of value. The role of journalism is to explain and contextualize the world, and we are about to unlock an entirely new layer of insight by having humans working alongside machines. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? Large language models are overhyped, but also under-utilized. There’s this illusion that they’re magical, that you can essentially ask something, or provide some input, and get the exact answer you want. That's simply not true. We've all read the stories of news organizations experimenting with language models to generate stories, and those stories being filled with errors, and it’s because this is a technology where you cannot experiment. You can’t have an informal, experimental approach, because there's so much effort that goes into fine-tuning and validating these systems. There are emerging approaches, including retrieval automated generation, to ground these systems in accurate data sources. What book most shaped your conception of the future? One is “Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power” by Byung-Chul Han. It's about the influence of new technology in shaping public perception and policy. The other is “The News: A User’s Manual” by Alain de Botton, which questions whether news is really new. It presents the idea that there's a cyclicality and a certain amount of finite events that are reported on in the news cycle. Natural disasters, international conflicts, political scandal, you have all of these pre-built narratives that fit within the human perception. My interpretation is that if that's true, then you can create a model of the world where you can quantify or perhaps predict the occurrence of events. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Right now a lot of language models are trained on public data like Wikipedia, but also on data that is copyrighted, including news articles from publishers that invest a lot of resources and time into producing that original content. Then you have tech companies that are scraping their content and training their model on it. For AI to be sustainable in the long term, all participants in the ecosystem need to be rewarded, and right now the tech companies are reaping the most reward. So I think recognition of ownership is important, and it’s not just a question of regulation, but also of business models. What has surprised you most this year? News organizations rushing to adopt AI systems. In some cases — and I'm not pointing fingers — this excitement led to some of the editorial standards and processes not being put at the forefront. It’s a case where the excitement of new technology blurred the importance of editorial guidelines. I was surprised by the number of publishers who tested AI, and didn’t have the right processes in place to validate their systems to make their information accurate. I was also surprised by the way that the use of these new technologies was communicated to the public, and to the journalists working at different news organizations who are testing these systems.   A message from CTIA – The Wireless Association: China is pushing countries to adopt their 5G spectrum vision and build a global market that favors their tech companies. To counter China’s ambitions, we need our own compelling vision for U.S. spectrum leadership over the next decade, and a clear commitment to make more 5G spectrum available. For our economic competitiveness, our national security, and our 5G leadership, America needs a bold new National Spectrum Strategy. Learn more.   taking devs' temperature Sam Altman’s call for Washington to regulate the AI industry doesn’t appear to have resonated within the industry. In a survey published today by the AI startup Arize, more than 350 engineers, data scientists, developers, technical business executives, and other AI workers answered questions about what AI tools they’re using, what they’re using them for, and whether they want government getting more involved in it. Their answer was somewhat ambivalent. Asked whether they “currently favor more regulation (i.e. federal licensing of LLMs) of model development or no new restrictions so open-source models can flourish” — a bit of a leading question, it must be noted — 43.5 percent said government should “hold off on new AI regulation” or “better enforce existing regulations,” while 42.4 percent remained either undecided or neutral. Only 14.1 percent said they actively wanted more regulation, something Arize claims reflects a gap in the industry between rank-and-file engineers and members of the C-suite who are more welcoming of regulation.   A message from CTIA – The Wireless Association:   u.k. optimism Despite the diplomatic hiccups accompanying United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s upcoming AI summit, some U.K. officials think he might just pull it off. That’s what POLITICO’s Vincent Manancourt and Eleni Courea reported today, writing that after surveying government officials, foreign diplomats, tech insiders, academics and civil society representatives, there’s a growing optimism that something beneficial might yet come out of an international summit whose planning has been so far shambolic. Sunak’s controversial decision to include China, they point out, is a particular opportunity for the summit to truly break some new ground, highlighting areas of potential cooperation between that country and the West: “This has the potential to show clearer lines on what the West and China can work on together on AI,” said Sihao Huang, an AI governance expert at Oxford University. “I think there is room for collaboration.”   YOUR TICKET INSIDE THE GOLDEN STATE POLITICAL ARENA: California Playbook delivers the latest intel, buzzy scoops and exclusive coverage from Sacramento and Los Angeles to Silicon Valley and across the state. Don't miss out on the daily must-read for political aficionados and professionals with an outsized interest in California politics, policy and power. Subscribe today.     Tweet of the Day THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Elon Musk remote dialed into X’s first all-hands meeting. Vice President Kamala Harris will attend the upcoming U.K. AI summit. The “driver-less” future might be a little less clear-cut than that term indicates. Citi used generative AI to read a massive tome of capital rules. Read more from former FCC chair Tom Wheeler’s new book on future tech regulation. Stay in touch with the whole team: Ben Schreckinger (bschreckinger@politico.com); Derek Robertson (drobertson@politico.com); Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@politico.com); Steve Heuser (sheuser@politico.com); Nate Robson (nrobson@politico.com) and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@politico.com). If you’ve had this newsletter forwarded to you, you can sign up and read our mission statement at the links provided.   A message from CTIA – The Wireless Association: America’s spectrum policy is stuck in neutral. The FCC’s spectrum auction authority has not been renewed, there is no pipeline of new spectrum for 5G, and China is poised to dominate global spectrum discussions, pushing for 15X more 5G spectrum than the U.S. America cannot afford to fall behind and become a spectrum island. The Biden Administration’s forthcoming National Spectrum Strategy is a unique and important opportunity to recommit ourselves to a bold vision for global spectrum leadership, secure our 5G leadership today and long-term leadership of the industries and innovations of the future. For our economic competitiveness and our national security, we need a National Spectrum Strategy that is committed to allocating 1500 MHz of new mid-band spectrum for 5G, and that reaffirms the critical role that NTIA and the FCC play in leading the nation’s spectrum policy. Learn more.     The World Strategic Forum (WSF) is taking place on November 6-7th in Miami, Florida at the Biltmore Hotel Coral Gables. WSF 2023 will discuss ‘Mastering the New Economy’, examining the ways in which business and society can thrive despite current economic and environmental challenges. The conference will gather 100+ speakers from companies including Volkswagen, Siemens and C3.ai, as well as U.S. Senator for Tennessee Bill Hagerty; Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis; Former President of Colombia Iván Duque Márquez and Former President of Ecuador Jamil Mahuad. Learn more and register now at www.worldstrategicforum.com.       Follow us on Twitter Ben Schreckinger @SchreckReports Derek Robertson @afternoondelete Steve Heuser @sfheuser   Follow us

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