The University of Michigan has partnered with OpenAI, an artificial intelligence development company, to establish new research funding and AI resources that will help the University to advance its own AI research. This partnership is part of NextGenAI, a $50 million dollar effort by OpenAI to advance AI projects at research institutions.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Engineering professor Michael Wellman said this new partnership, one of 15 similar partnerships OpenAI has created with other research institutions, has been in the works for several months. Wellman gave some insight into the process for joining the partnership and said the University would soon accept proposals from faculty for potential projects seeking funding.
“We are right now preparing a call for proposals, which we will be publishing to the University community and Ann Arbor campus,” Wellman said. “Unfortunately, we are only going to be able to support a small number of these in the first round, but we are looking to showcase really the breadth of really interesting ideas that people all around campus have related to AI.”
If projects are selected, Wellman said researchers will gain access to key resources to use via an Application Programming Interface while collaborating on their projects, including funding for computational resources that will aid in more intensive research.
“They’ll get some resources, of course, which will include some funding that can be spent on the research,” Wellman said. “And especially important, is access to OpenAI’s models and tools. They’ll also be able to get certain amount of credits to use for API access to the latest open AI models, and this is something that they can also have access to through paid services, but this may be able to let them really engage with the models at higher scale and intensity than they could in their current research.”
In an email to The Daily, Richard Lewis, psychology, linguistics and cognitive science professor, wrote that AI has struggled to replicate some level of human consciousness.
“It is astonishing how quickly many of the benchmarks used to assess AI capabilities have been rendered obsolete,” Lewis said. “But one thing has remained true throughout all of these advances: We do not yet have systems that robustly achieve human-level cognitive abilities from training on human-scale data. Some think that this is revealing of a fundamental problem with current approaches, but I think it is way too early to know.”
In an email to The Daily, Information student Nandini Valluru wrote that, despite improvements in AI training, it can still lack the emotion and personal voice characteristic of human-generated writing and art.
“I think AI struggles with replicating human emotion and spirit,” Valluru said. “An AI-generated piece of writing always lacks the emotion and voice of a human-written piece. You know when you read something that is so human or watch something that feels very human? Art is human, and I don’t think AI could do it as well as humans.”
Despite noting the significant impacts of AI, Wellman said the technology’s advancements come with risks and benefits that the University has a duty to diligently monitor.
“Artificial intelligence is really leading to very transformative effects in our society and the kinds of problems we can solve and how we work, how we learn, how we really do everything,” Wellman said. “New kinds of biases could appear or could be magnified by AI. There’s also lots of potential ways that AI can help democratize access to knowledge and lead to tremendous benefits.”
Wellman also said academic institutions must maintain ethical and safe AI development, particularly at a public university like the University of Michigan.
“As academics, we represent the public sector, especially at a public university like the University of Michigan, and so we have a mandate to help society navigate this AI transformation in ways that are beneficial to human beings and to society at large,” Wellman said.
Valluru also shared her insights on the ethical concerns surrounding AI’s advancements and wrote the issue of maintaining diverse perspectives and inclusion of minority groups in its development remains especially important.
“We need legislation and regulations surrounding AI and where it is used,” Valluru wrote. “Evaluate training data and models routinely. Involve diverse perspectives. If models are built with only one perspective, then those perspectives are championed in the technology, leaving behind other groups of people.”
Wellman said he was hopeful that if this collaboration is successful, it could lead to a long-term partnership between the University and OpenAI.
“These are going to be modest size projects, but they’ll be relatively short term, at least for just a year,” Wellman said. “We do hope that this collaboration will be successful, and we may be able to have an ongoing relationship and follow on projects, but it really will help these investigators pursue their cutting edge ideas.”
Daily Staff Reporter Emma Sulaiman can be reached at emmasul@umich.edu.
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