Hot Newsuna game The 2024 Good Tech Awards
In the tech industry, 2024 was a year of fast change and shifting winds.
Tech companies continued to make breakneck progress in artificial intelligence, with A.I. products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude all getting big updates during the year, and billions being spent on the creation of even more powerful models. (And the researchers behind Google’s AlphaFold, an A.I. project on proteins that I gave a Good Tech Award three years ago, got a slightly more prestigious award this year — the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.)
But A.I. was not the only thing happening in Silicon Valley. This year, tech companies fought bitterly with regulators and clashed with governments, and a revanchist “founder mode” movement led some tech chief executives to embrace micromanagement. In the fall, as the election gripped the nation, an ascendant “tech right” lined up behind Donald J. Trump. After his win, many tech leaders began sucking up to the president-elect in hopes of an easier second term.
Every year in this column, I try to shine the spotlight on a few tech projects that I think contributed positively to humanity. As always, my criteria for what constitutes “good tech” are vague and arbitrary, but it has become an important exercise for me. One reason is that it helps me offset any subconscious negativity bias I have during the year. Another is that I’ve heard from previous recipients that getting an award for their work (even one that consists purely of a mention in a newspaper column, and has no prize attached) has inspired them to keep going. I think technologists should use their powers for the public good, and I hope everyone on this year’s list will be similarly encouraged.
free play casinoSo with no further ado, here are this year’s Good Tech Awards:
To Epoch AI, for giving us reliable data on the A.I. boomFew groups this year were more widely praised among A.I. insiders than Epoch AI, a small nonprofit research organization whose work has helped lawmakers, academics and the public at large understand what’s happening in A.I.
Epoch AI was started in 2022 and is run today by Jaime Sevilla, a 28-year-old Spanish A.I. researcher who believes that the industry needs better data about its own trends and trajectories. The firm maintains public databases of A.I. models and A.I. hardware, and publishes research on A.I. trends, including an influential report this year about whether A.I. models can continue to grow at their current pace. (Epoch AI concluded they most likely could until 2030.) It also develops its own tests to gauge the capabilities of leading A.I. models, such as the FrontierMath benchmark, which tests advanced mathematical skill.
To make good decisions about A.I., we need an accurate picture of the technology’s progress, and Epoch AI’s work has brought much-needed rigor and empiricism to an industry that often runs on hype and vibes.
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