Enlarge / Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber defied expectations to deliver a document that explicitly calls for limits on fossil fuel use. (credit: Fadel Dawod )

On Wednesday, the UN's COP28 meeting wrapped up with a major success: Despite a bruising fight with OPEC nations , the closing agreement included a call for a transition away from fossil fuels. There's still plenty here for various parties to dislike, but this is the first agreement that makes the implications of the Paris Treaty explicit: We can't limit climate change and continue to burn fossil fuels at anything close to the rate we currently do.

Beyond that, however, the report has something to disappoint everyone. It catalogs strong signs of incremental progress toward the Paris goals while acknowledging we're running out of time for further increments. And the steps it calls for will likely keep changes on a similar trajectory.

Taking stock

The new document is called a "Global Stocktake" in reference to checking the world's progress toward the goals of the Paris Agreement: limit climate change to 2° C above preindustrial temperatures and try to keep it to 1.5° C. That agreement called for nations to make pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions; initial pledges were insufficient, but regular meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COP) would allow the pledges to be updated, raising their aggressiveness until the world is on a trajectory toward meeting its goals.

Enlarge / AI image synthesis advances in 2022 have made images like this one possible, which was created using Stable Diffusion, enhanced with GFPGAN, expanded with DALL-E, and then manually composited together. (credit: Benj Edwards / Ars Technica)

More than once this year, AI experts have repeated a familiar refrain: "Please slow down." AI news in 2022 has been rapid-fire and relentless; the moment you knew where things currently stood in AI, a new paper or discovery would make that understanding obsolete.

In 2022, we arguably hit the knee of the curve when it came to generative AI that can produce creative works made up of text, images, audio, and video. This year, deep-learning AI emerged from a decade of research and began making its way into commercial applications, allowing millions of people to try out the tech for the first time. AI creations inspired wonder, created controversies, prompted existential crises, and turned heads.

Here's a look back at the seven biggest AI news stories of the year. It was hard to choose only seven, but if we didn't cut it off somewhere, we'd still be writing about this year's events well into 2023 and beyond.

Enlarge / A screenshot of an online game of Diplomacy , including a running chat dialog, provided by a Cicero researcher. (credit: Meta AI )

On Tuesday, Meta AI announced the development of Cicero, which it clams is the first AI to achieve human-level performance in the strategic board game Diplomacy . It's a notable achievement because the game requires deep interpersonal negotiation skills, which implies that Cicero has obtained a certain mastery of language necessary to win the game.

Even before Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 , board games were a useful measure of AI achievement. In 2015, another barrier fell when AlphaGo defeated Go master Lee Sedol. Both of those games follow a relatively clear set of analytical rules (although Go's rules are typically simplified for computer AI).

But with Diplomacy, a large portion of the gameplay involves social skills. Players must show empathy, use natural language, and build relationships to win—a difficult task for a computer player. With this in mind, Meta asked, "Can we build more effective and flexible agents that can use language to negotiate, persuade, and work with people to achieve strategic goals similar to the way humans do?"