Foundation models are going multimodal
Every time I read on of these articles, I just keep asking myself the question, why? Why do people actually wake up in the morning and work on this stuff:<p><i>Video understanding tasks are becoming increasingly important in our society. With the rise of video content on social media platforms and the increasing use of surveillance cameras in public spaces, there is a growing need for automated video understanding systems. However, despite the importance of this problem, it has received relatively little attention compared to text and image understanding tasks.</i><p>I just cannot understand why you&#x27;d want to be contributing to &quot;the next generation of ultra high performance video surveillance&quot;, for example. I think mostly, young enthusiastic people like to tell themselves they&#x27;re some how just going to be helping the poor, disabled and disenfranchised, but these things are ultimately going to be used to build terminators and robo cops. You&#x27;re lying to yourself if you don&#x27;t think this is the case.<p>I&#x27;ll probably get down voted for this, but I find AI people just weird. The cognitive dissonance is staggering.<p>Nearly everyone is concerned about the risks, yet people seem to wake up in the morning, hop on the Google staff bus and go off to work building this stuff? Strange behavior.<p>I saw Geoffrey Hinton talking the other day about what the world will look like when we have police and soldiers with no morals, it will be absolutely fucked, like you will be able to crush, and I mean crush and dissent with absolutely no guilt, no obstructions, no moral qualms.<p>Why work on tech that contributes to this world? If the argument here is &quot;because China is doing it too&quot;, I think a better solution is to pick up the phone, and start talking with China about the world we should be building together for our children, not to start an arms race which will just wipe people out.<p>I truly hope I&#x27;m wrong and we&#x27;re on the cusp of techno utopia, but I really can&#x27;t imagine that we are going to a better place given the current trajectory.