Good morning. Meta dropped a few new Llama models — we’re up to Llama 4, now — over the weekend (and all I did was make a perfectly roasted pork loin).

We’ll be diving into them tomorrow. In the meantime, the UN has a warning for the world, and it’s all about AI.

Welcome to your week.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

• 🔬 AI for Good: Assessing carbon sequestration 

• 🏛️ New Jersey just outlawed deepfakes 

• 🌎 UN says countries must take measures to prevent global AI inequality

AI for Good: Assessing carbon sequestration 

Part of the battle against climate change involves immediately ceasing our ongoing production of carbon emissions. The other part involves removing existing carbon from the atmosphere. 

Nature happens to be really good at the second part. Natural carbon sinks — forests, plankton in the oceans, general plant life and vegetation — absorb carbon as a part of photosynthesis, thus removing it from the air. Coastal ecosystems specifically — such as mangroves and salt marshes — play a crucial role here, since they tend to sequester carbon much deeper underground than their non-coastal counterparts. 

What happened: In an effort to better assess, model and predict the ways in which these coastal ecosystems are successfully (or otherwise) sequestering carbon, researchers at Lamar University in Texas recently investigated the capability of artificial intelligence and remote sensing technologies to enhance their monitoring of these ecosystems. 

• The researchers applied both classical machine learning algorithms in addition to deep neural networks to estimate biomass, classify vegetation and predict carbon sequestration changes over time. 

• They combined these algorithms with a variety of remote sensing techniques, including satellite imagery and automated drones. 

Why it matters: The team found that the AI-driven approaches increased the accuracy of biomass estimation by 28% compared to previous methods, and further significantly reduced their need for manual field work, a vital component considering how thinly stretched environmental researchers are. 

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New Jersey just outlawed deepfakes

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy last week enacted a law that criminalizes the production and dissemination of certain types of deepfakes. 

The details: The bill, A3540, specifically calls for the application of both civil and criminal penalties to the unlawful use of deepfake technology. 

• These unlawful applications include harassment, cyber harassment, false public alarms, attempts to influence public officials or political matters — including elections — and sexual abuse of minors. 

• Violations of the law could result in both prison time and fines of up to $30,000, not including civil action. 

“While AI technologies present significant opportunity, as a parent, I share the Governor’s concern for the ways bad actors can use AI to endanger and harm our children. And as Secretary of State I also share concerns for interference with our elections,” Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way said in a statement. “This legislation sends a clear message: New Jersey is ready for AI – both for all the good it can do, as well as the dangers it presents.”

The landscape: The issue of deepfake harassment has been ongoing since at least 2017. But, back in 2017, deepfakes took hours or days to make, and they weren’t all that realistic. Now, cheaply accessible generative AI models have made it trivial to generate realistic images of just about anyone; we’ve seen this leveraged to cause harm in a number of ways, including fraud and general misinformation, alongside a rising number of cases — specifically, at schools — in which explicit deepfakes have been used as a means of harassing classmates. 

There exist dozens of “nudify” websites that advertise “AI undressing” features. 

With this law, New Jersey is joining dozens of states that have already enacted similar pieces of deepfake legislation. Though bills have been presented at the federal level, there exist no federal laws regarding deepfakes.

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• The roadmap: Sam Altman said Friday that OpenAI has decided to “release o3 and o4-mini after all, probably in a couple of weeks, and then do GPT-5 in a few months.” He said that OpenAI will be able to make GPT-5 “much better than we originally thought.” I’ll believe it when I see it.

• Happy Birthday, Microsoft: 50 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in a strip mall in Albuquerque. In 1986, Microsoft debuted on the stock market for less than one cent per share. By ‘96, it was a $55 billion company. Today, even after the recent (ongoing?) stock market rout, it’s valued at $2.7 trillion.

• Oil prices drop to lowest since 2021 amid fears of a global trade war (Semafor).

• Could an inexpensive vaccine help stave off dementia? (Vox).

• DOGE wants access to taxpayer data (Wired).

• Tesla’s June robotaxi deadline looms as political backlash builds over Elon Musk (CNBC).

• Musk and OpenAI jury trial to begin in spring next year (Reuters).

UN says countries must take measures to prevent global AI inequality

Joseph Schumpeter, an early 20th-century economist, once said that the essential aspect of capitalism involves something he termed “creative destruction,” a process of “industrial mutation … that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” 

His notion of creative destruction, in which new innovations destroy old ones, appears to exist at the core of artificial intelligence. 

A recent report published by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) contends that the AI industry — which consists of a large pipeline of hardware, software and services that expand far beyond just generative AI — is on course to reach $4.8 trillion in market value by 2033. 

This is a bit ahead of other projections. Statista, for instance, says the AI market will reach $243 billion in 2025, and is on pace to top $800 billion by the end of the decade.  

Alongside this rosy picture of dramatic growth, the report warned that 40% of jobs could be impacted by generative AI. Beyond that, the report called out the growing, international inequality that has, thus far, proliferated around AI, with just 100 countries responsible for 40% of the world’s investment in AI research and development. 

The landscape: This is not the first we’ve heard of both the jobs and global inequality risks associated with AI. Two years ago, AI expert Dr. Srinivas Mukkamala told me that the Industrial Revolution “displaced hundreds of thousands of workers. Software displaced millions of workers. And then with AI, that number is going to be exponentially larger than what software did."

• He warned then that, while the technology will boost many countries’ GDPs, it will further widen the gap between skilled and unskilled countries, creating “so much inequality that no politician can address it.”

• “The only thing I'm concerned with is the haves and the have-nots. This is going to create inequality that we've never seen in our lifetimes," Mukkamala said at the time. "We're going to pretty much have 99% of the world's population left behind. There is just no doubt about it. We're going to create a true economic crater.”

A number of reports over the years have addressed some of these concerns. 

A Goldman Sachs report from 2023 found that — “If generative AI delivers on its promised capabilities” — roughly 66% of all jobs are exposed to some degree of automation, putting about 300 million jobs at risk. 

A report by Accenture at around the same time claimed that generative AI could impact 40% of all working hours, particularly targeting clerical and administrative work. 

A 2024 report from the IMF (International Monetary Fund, not Impossible Mission Force) found that “40% of global employment is exposed to AI.” 

Still, all these reports — including the recent UN one — have claimed that jobs themselves won’t disappear; they’ll just change. What these new jobs will look like remains pretty unclear, though the World Economic Forum expects software engineers, designers and prompt-engineers to proliferate. 

The details: This is the crux of the UN’s report; that governments around the world must collaboratively invest in “three key leverage points: infrastructure, data and skills.”

• All countries, the report says, must have access to reliable internet connections and enough computing power needed to run AI; all of these systems must have access to quality training data; and people must be equipped with “the digital and problem-solving skills needed to thrive in an AI-driven world.”

• “History has shown that while technological progress drives economic growth, it does not on its own ensure equitable income distribution or promote inclusive human development,” UNCTAD Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan said in the report.

The focus, she said, must shift “from technology to people, enabling countries to co-create a global artificial intelligence framework. Such a framework should prioritise shared prosperity, create public goods and place humanity at the heart of artificial intelligence development.”

But the challenge here is enormous, and it goes far deeper than AI-readiness. 

Roughly 1.4 billion people live in what the UN calls the world’s “least developed countries.” Of those, only about 36% have internet access and only 52% have electricity. Only 8% of households in these countries have a computer. Even experimentation in AI technologies requires a vast pipeline of hardware and software that starts with electricity and internet access, and spans advanced, sizeable data centers and end-computing devices. 

A twist in the story: The story we’ve been hearing — echoed in these reports — since 2023 has been one of inevitable and wide-scale disruption. But, two years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, that hasn’t happened. 

In fact, to a degree, we’ve started to see the reverse.

At around the same time those reports were surfacing in 2023, warning of the end of clerical work, fintech firm Klarna halted all hiring, allowing its workforce to shrink by some 20%. Klarna’s CEO figured that generative AI chatbots were good enough to replace hundreds of customer service workers, so he replaced them. 

In February, Klarna reversed course, saying: “we just had an epiphany: in a world of AI nothing will be as valuable as humans. Ok, you can laugh at us for realizing it so late, but we are going to kick off work to allow Klarna to become the best at offering a human to speak to!!!”

First, figuring out the true market value of AI is a near impossibility, considering the fact that it is getting incorporated into existing software and services. For instance, since Microsoft shoved Copilot into 365, does the 365 market count as part of the AI market? I don’t know that it should; but it’s impossible to track those users who actually use Copilot within that ecosystem. 

This is happening everywhere, all the time. 

Second, I think the critical qualifier worth calling out from that early Goldman report is the following: “if generative AI delivers on its promised capabilities...” 

If. 

When the reliability of a given software can’t be guaranteed — and with generative AI, it can’t — human work will not be erased. 

Period. 

There will certainly be rocky moments, but I think Klarna is a great example; they tried to replace humans, and they ended up bringing them back. Beyond reliability, there is a simple truth in the fact that we live in a society of people, and people would almost always rather interact with other people. And since machines won’t ever be perfect, we’ll always have to. 

Self-checkout didn’t kill the cashier. 

And when it comes to issues of global inequality, to me — and, I imagine, to the folks who live there — access to and education around generative AI are low on the list of priorities. Let’s make electricity widespread and cheaply accessible first. And maybe let’s get the rest of the world reliable access to safe drinking water, too.

But, AI or not, the reality of global society is that if we act without empathy, people will get left behind. So, in the end, I think it’s that human capacity for empathy, and that human capability for helping other people, that will be the most important.

Wrapping it all up in chatbots and AI misses the bigger picture. 

🤔 Your thought process:

Selected Image 1 (Left):

• “The backpack on image 2 doesn’t look to be sitting quite right. And the man’s arms are not in proportion to his stature.”

Selected Image 2 (Right):

• “The other guy's pose looks really uncomfortable.”

💭 A poll before you go

Thanks for reading today’s edition of The Deep View!

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Here’s your view on GenAI for school:

A quarter of you (who are in college) use generative AI, depending on the assignment.

20% never use it, and 18% use it all the time.

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