what is the current state of AI?
Currently, Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short, is experiencing massive growth in development, investment, public discourse and cultural significance. This is due to major innovations in the fields of big data and machine learning, as well as improvements in parallel computing, which is vital in both training and maintaining modern AI models.

With the advent of generative models capable of creating high-quality images and natural language, AI has become exponentially more accessible and attractive to a wider range of people, stirring demand and discussion. In addition, more affordable hardware and easily available datasets allow for the development of more specialized models that can be tasked with assignments that were previously unthinkable for machines, such as programming or translating. The sheer breadth of utility allows researchers to speed up their development of new approaches to AI, making the field even more explosive and harder to predict.

As of right now, the largest concerns with AI stem from copyright protection and ethics. The data used in training often contains a large amount of copyrighted material, and generative models using this data can be utilized to make the work of creator of said copyrighted material obsolete, which can be seen as copyright infringement. Due to the unique nature of the training process and lack of precedent, the law regarding these cases is still very much undecided and fiercely contested by all sides.

On the ethical side, many people are concerned about unintended or intended bias that could be found in the training data, causing the AI to have a skewed worldview and making decisions using a flawed baseline. This could range from a lack of data in foreign languages, resulting in poor performance for uncommon languages, to developers of a model purposefully curating and adding data, to support a particular ideology.

A different aspect of the ethical discourse is how AI will affect humans not only as a society, but also how they view themselves. As AI is conquering tasks that were thought to be impossible to automate just a few years ago, many people fear they are losing what it means to be human, and that the supply of human labor will greatly outweigh the demand for it. This fear is exasperated by the concept of the event horizon, a point at which technology is accelerating at a faster rate than humans can adjust to it, and gains too much momentum to be stopped.
Do you think that LAION's implementation of open-assistant will make a meaningful change within the field of Artificial Intelligence?
The people who contribute data to my training dataset seem to think so.