At Collison 2022 in Toronto last week, former Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt shared his thoughts on where artificial intelligence (AI) is headed, and what dangers it’s facing in the path of its rapid development.

He opened the discussion by highlighting the evolving focus of the AI landscape.

“If you look at the biggest thing 10 years ago… [it] was imaging, and in particular the fact that vision through things like image net and others would become better on computers than for humans.”

Schmidt said there are now two major pursuits in the current AI cycle. One is to understand the underlying principles of multi-dimensional input and output mapping. And the other is to continually improve large language models.

Furthermore, as AIs has grown more powerful, two emergent AI paradigms are taking off. One is multimodal AI that can learn using multiple types of data, including audio, video, number,s and images. In the future, multimodal AI can fluidly solve problems involving different or multiple data types and provide richer answers.