Murphy touts NJ’s AI sector ahead of trip
Film, tech industries also on Silicon Valley agenda
Gov. Phil Murphy will head to Silicon Valley and Hollywood in California this weekend in a bid to pitch New Jersey’s film and high tech sectors — especially artificial intelligence — to businesses out west.
On Thursday, Murphy addressed an artificial intelligence summit hosted at Princeton University — a sector he’s referred to as a “moonshot” industry in the Garden State.
“We’re coming together to think ahead about one of the most positive and promising and potentially disruptive developments in human history,” the governor said Thursday afternoon.
New Jersey, Murphy continued during his keynote address, is “perfectly positioned to lead the way in harnessing generative AI to address some of our world’s greatest challenges.”
Murphy’s economic mission will run April 14 to 17, according to business magazine ROI-NJ. It will feature the first lady, Tammy Murphy, as well as Tim Sullivan, head of the state Economic Development Authority, and Wesley Matthews, head of Choose NJ, a nonprofit started by former Gov. Chris Christie to pay for the governor’s economic missions.
Choose NJ spokesperson Ingrid Austin said the trip will take Murphy and his entourage through Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay area and Hollywood in Los Angeles, and that the nonprofit will pay for this trip.
“While industries like filmmaking and technology have long found a home on the West Coast, the truth is today, there is a whole new world of opportunity opening up right here in the Garden State,” Murphy, a Democrat, said last month in Atlantic City.
What is AI? What’s it used for?
AI, and more specifically generative AI, is a technology that processes data from the internet like a human brain to create content — text, pictures, video, music — based on users’ instructions.
Its emergence has meant that suddenly people who weren’t computer scientists and didn’t know how to write code could get their computer to perform tasks in seconds that would have take them minutes, hours or days to do in the past: respond to emails, write marketing brochures, design a magazine cover.
Technological applications in AI could range from fusion control to the power grid, chip design, home assistants and surgery, said Mengdi Wang, an associate professor at Princeton University’s Center for Statistics and Machine Learning.
Generative AI could be used for more mundane tasks that could otherwise take hours or days, and data searching becomes easier.
At the forefront was OpenAi, a company based in San Francisco that was founded in 2015 to create a generative AI platform available to the public.
Its financial backers have included Elon Musk, Amazon and Microsoft. And it has rolled out ChatGPT, which generates text, and DALL-E, which generates digital images, with new versions providing increasingly human-like responses.
A recent report by the Pew Research Center found that 23% of American adults have used AI chatbot ChatGPT, up from 18% last July.
“It’s like a Wild West,” said Aaron Price, chief executive officer of Tech United, a trade group for New Jersey’s high-tech industry. “Parts of the technology are very mature, parts of the technology are immature.”
Comes with major downsides, needs ‘guardrails’
The technology comes with massive downsides.
The federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency warned that ahead of the 2024 elections, generative AI could be used by foreign adversaries, cybercriminals and any member of the public to depict political figures in compromising positions or saying controversial statements that they didn’t actually make.
USA TODAY reported on the prevalence of AI-generated nude images of famous and non-famous people alike. Graphic images generated of Taylor Swift were one glaring example. ChatGPT meanwhile has been used to generate academic essays by students, essentially cheating.
“It needs some guardrails,” Teik Lim, president of the Newark-based New Jersey Institute of Technology, said in an interview last month.
AI-generated content could, for example, be required to display a prominent disclaimer that it is AI-generated, Lim said.
Kristin Dana, a computer engineering professor at Rutgers University, said that in some cases, AI might have trouble with such basic tasks as discerning between a school bus and an ostrich, given the right conditions.
“Deep learning can fail in surprising ways,” she said at the Princeton summit, in reference to the process by which AI teaches something to a computer.
“We’re coming together to think ahead about one of the most positive and promising and potentially disruptive developments in human history.” Phil Murphy New Jersey governor, on artificial intelligence
What’s NJ doing with AI?
In December, Murphy and Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said they would establish an AI hub at the Ivy League school. It would, under the plans, bring jobs and economic development while pushing forward the state’s AI industry.
New Jersey has an artificial intelligence task force, which is responsible for analyzing the potential social impacts and risks that come with artificial intelligence. The task force is also responsible for educating the state’s workforce and offering recommendations to authorities.
Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Madison campus is sponsoring a contest for middle school and high school students worldwide to create content using ChatGPT, the free AI system.
Michael Diamond from the Asbury Park Press contributed to this article.
Daniel Munoz covers business, consumer affairs, labor and the economy for NorthJersey.com and The Record.