Message from President

For us,
It seems we’ve arrived at the starting point of the future.

In the summer of 1956, a little more than a decade after computers first came into the world, computer science pioneers at Dartmouth College coined the term Artificial Intelligence (AI). Soon, researchers realized that it would take an endless amount of information to teach computers the common sense that even infants had acquired.

The first turning point came in 1972, when Alan Kay published his idea for a “Dynabook” computer for children, along with the concept of Personal Computing. We now knew what computers will look like in the future. The paper, which was derided as science fiction at the time, became reality and was commercialized thanks to the rapid development of semiconductors and integrated circuits. In particular, the huge success of the “Apple ll” in 1977 spawned a huge new PC industry worldwide, and Microsoft Corporation, which dominated PC operation systems, grew into a major corporation that transcended all borders.

In the 1980s, as PCs spreaded to offices and homes around the world, people began to use existing telephone lines to communicate with each other. 1989, the World Wide Web (WWW) was launched by the European Institute for Nuclear Research in Switzerland. With the World Wide Web, people began to post all kinds of information as homepages on the Internet. This was the beginning of the digitization of all information. At the same time, Digital Hollywood opened in Tokyo.

On the other hand, the trend of real-time 3D graphics, which started with Silicon Graphics, was immediately applied to home video game consoles such as PlayStation, leading to the rapid development of dedicated graphics chipsets. The hundreds of millions of game consoles in the market are lavishly invested in advanced technology, spawning unicorns such as NVIDIA. We discovered the joys of being immersed in 3DCG.

By the end of the 1990s, all kinds of businesses using the Internet were invented and “.com” boomed, and from Silicon Valley, the center of the Internet, grew Yahoo!, Google, eBay etc. Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, returned to the company that was thought to be fading away and launched the “Think Different” campaign worldwide. iMac and iPod were huge hits, and in 2007, the iPhone was introduced. People were hooked on selfies and social networking, and Amazon was the place to shop. The ideal world of personal computing, where everyone in the world carries a supercomputer connected to the Internet, became reality with smartphones.

AI research and development had been stagnant for a long time, but an epochal breakthrough occurred when a large number of GPU boards developed for real-time computer graphics were linked together. A world that had been theoretically possible but practically impossible to compute suddenly became computable. This is the deep learning boom that began in 2012. The Go AI, which swallowed all kinds of game records and trained at a speed that no human could match, easily defeated world champions.

Since that time, attention has focused on the key to the quality and quantity of training data to be loaded into AI. An AI at a level useful to everyone must know a vast amount of information. That information will be the programming languages, text, images, audio, and video that lie in the cloud that people all over the world have uploaded to the Internet over the last few decades. It can be seen as if all mankind has been working day and night, day and night, to bring about the Singularity. The data of the large-scale language model has been created by us. Therefore, it is only natural that it contains mistakes, lies, and malicious intent. And the robots that operate on this well-researched basic data will act like our partners, adhering to the Three Principles of Robotics. The application of generative AI has just begun.

Today, we learn language at an early age and use it to think. Now that we have letters, we can express our thoughts in writing. Of course, we also turn our thoughts into pictures, music, sculpture, and dance. In the same way, AI can answer our questions not only with text, but also with images, videos, music, 3D models, programming languages, and so on, just as humans do. It seems that AI has finally reached a point where it deserves to be called AI.

Needless to say, the liberal arts, ancient and modern, will help us ask better questions of AI. AI, with its ability for individual optimization, will be the best teacher of learning, and the speed of learning will increase dramatically. In the world we build with AI, we will develop billions of diverse cultures, and the sum of these cultures will create a new image of humanity and society.

The vast memory capacity and calculation speed of modern computers, which far exceed human knowledge, make all kinds of simulations possible and contribute to the development of science and technology. It is of course thanks to computers that we were able to develop a vaccine against the new coronavirus in a few months. Elon Musk’s Space X combines the high level of craftsmanship of human engineers with computer science to efficiently manufacture rockets. This is the first step toward realizing mankind’s grand mission to expand the cultural sphere into space. Humanity is on the path to becoming a multi-planetary species. AI will be with us then.

Many of the tasks of the 20th century will be done far more efficiently by AI, and we will have more time for our own adventures. Computers are on track to pass the Turing test anytime, anywhere within 80 years or so of their birth. We are barely at the starting point of the coming world of AI. Technology will continue to develop exponentially, as scientists predict. The Singularity will quickly become a thing of the past, and the world’s ubiquitous advanced technology will widen the gap and further confuse human society. Nevertheless, our lives will continue to move forward on the time axis. If possible, we do not want our lives to be dragged down, but to continue to challenge ourselves. Then, learning will illuminate our path.

AI that surpasses human intelligence, robots driven by that AI, endless dives into information space, and interplanetary travel. At last, we have all the actors that are typical of the 21st century. Let us start a new future with the joy of living in real time in the era of the greatest change in human history!

April 2023
President of Digital Hollywood University
Tomoyuki Sugiyama