New Jersey governor touting innovations that are AI-powered
Murphy going to California in effort to bolster sector
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and top administration officials are expected to travel to California next month to tout the Garden State’s artificial intelligence industry to Silicon Valley and Hollywood, a news report said.
The trip will start April 11 after an AI conference at Princeton University and run through April 17, concluding with a trip in Southern California to earn the buy-in of the region’s film executives. That’s according to the business magazine ROI-NJ, which first reported the planned trip.
Representatives from Murphy’s office couldn’t be immediately reached for comment on Tuesday morning.
This comes as the latest effort for bolstering a sector in New Jersey that Murphy has called a “moonshot” project.
“The goal is for our government to be a catalyst to bring together our top minds to unleash game-changing, AIpowered innovations,” Murphy said during his budget address in February. “Innovations that create jobs instead of killing them. That help unite our world – by expanding access to health care or education – rather than divide it.”
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 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 take the users minutes, hours or days to do: respond to emails, write marketing brochures, design a magazine cover.
At the forefront was OpenAI, a company based in San Francisco that was founded in 2015 to create a generative AI platform that was available to the public.
Its financial backers have included Elon Musk, Amazon and Microsoft. It rolled out ChatGPT, which generates text, and DALL-E, which generates digital images, with new versions providing increasingly human-like responses.
Generative AI could be used for more mundane tasks that could otherwise take hours or days, and datasearching becomes easier.
“This is transformative,” James Barrood, founder and chief executive officer of Innovation+, an AI consulting firm, told the Asbury Park Press, part of the USA TODAY Network.
But the technology comes with massive downsides. The federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure 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.
In December, Murphy and Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber said they would establish an AI hub at the Ivy League college. It would, under the plans, bring jobs and economic development while pushing forward the state’s AI industry.
New Jersey has an AI 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.
Contributing: Michael Diamond, Asbury Park Press