Do you know what I had in mind when I left the offices of Innovobot, a Montreal “innovation and investment” company that occupies 11e floor of a building in Plateau Mont-Royal?
THE riff song guitar Revolution of the Beatles.
I had spent about 90 minutes discussing artificial intelligence with five of the employees at this small company.
Discover the inventions that were born there (including a small underwater robot that can move thanks to AI).
And during our discussions, the word “revolution” was mentioned more than once.
Among other things when I asked Innovobot’s director of operations, Fadi Albatal, to assess the changes underway in the field of artificial intelligence.
“It’s a revolution,” he said. And I felt that he weighed his words.
“The first papers on image recognition started coming out of the University of Montreal and the University of Toronto in around 2012. And now we’re talking about cars that run on their own, planes that fly and land on their own, machines that can write newspaper articles, machines that can do mechanical, electrical, electronic design, machines that can prescribe medications , who can produce images…”
And added: “We can do all that after a decade. This is the definition of a revolution! »
I had contacted those responsible for Innovobot because I was seeking to understand what awaits us in terms of artificial intelligence in 2024. Knowing that in various media, some have expressed doubts in recent weeks about the real value of the developments of 2023.
There was indeed a buzz media, but “has anything changed?” “, asked for example a journalist from the renowned Financial Times.
When I spoke about this article to Sylvain Carle, a partner at Innovobot who has the title of Head of Technologies for Good, he responded by telling me about the exponential nature of progress in artificial intelligence.
To understand the skepticism displayed by some, he offered me a metaphor worthy of a fable by La Fontaine.
He asked me to imagine a pond where there are frogs and water lilies – which also have the particularity of reproducing exponentially.
“At first there was one, then two, then four. And one day, [la mare] is half full. So the next day, it will be completely full. I think it’s this acceleration and this exponential factor that is difficult for the public to perceive,” he explained.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Sylvain Carle, partner at Innovobot
It’s getting faster and faster. And everything we have accomplished in terms of progress is combined with new advances. This year we will probably see the arrival of new approaches in artificial intelligence.
Sylvain Carle, partner at Innovobot
Professor of computational psychiatry at the University of Montreal, Guillaume Dumas agrees.
“The problem is that we have a field where so many people play the sensationalism card that, inevitably, it creates amplified expectations in relation to the time it takes to go from idea to application. »
However, he confirms that artificial intelligence is indeed already changing the game in its favorite field: health.
According to him, 2023 is a year that represents “continuity” in this sector. For example, AI has been used to analyze medical images, particularly in radiology and dermatology.
Generally, this will continue in 2024, he says.
Just as we will continue to use artificial intelligence to “identify new chemical components for drugs”.
But what will really explode in 2024 is everything related to the application of conversational robots like ChatGPT to medical care. And that goes from triage at hospital entrance to psychotherapy.
Guillaume Dumas, professor of computational psychiatry at the University of Montreal
Guillaume Dumas, who is also director of the precision psychiatry and social physiology laboratory at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center, recognizes that “it is extremely complex” to use conversational robots for mental health problems.
But ChatGPT users have already started using it with this objective in 2023, so no question of burying your head in the sand!
“There are a lot of ethical barriers, but it will be necessary to train doctors and, potentially also, citizens. »