Close-up of a young woman speaking with a virtual digital voice recognition assistant. African woman using … [+]
It’s hard to believe, but ChatGPT launched just a year ago, in late November 2022, propelling generative AI into the mainstream. Since then, almost every tech giant, from Microsoft to Google to Amazon, has jumped on the AI generation high-speed train.
Yet as technologists discover more and more time- and money-saving use cases across the enterprise, schools and businesses around the world are struggling to find the right balance of technology in the “real world”.
As the year progressed, the rapid emergence and proliferation led not only to rapid innovation and competitive leap forward, but also to a continuous wave of moral and ethical debates and even led to regulations and early decrees on the implementation of AI around the world. as well as global alliances – such as the recent Meta + IBM AI Alliance – to attempt to develop open frameworks and stricter standards in the implementation of safe and economically sustainable AI.
Nevertheless, a transformative year with almost daily changes in this exciting technological story. What follows is a brief history of the year in generative AI and what it means for us going forward.
The year of the AI generation: how it started
As a reminder, generative AI, aka “Gen AI,” took the world by storm a year ago with the advent of ChatGPT, a technology launched by artificial intelligence developer OpenAI. In a matter of days, ChatGPT changed the way we think about everything from business to education, allowing the average person to write almost anything – letters, memoirs, TV scripts – with a single click.
All a user has to do is enter a few key prompts (e.g. “Create a movie storyline similar to Alien with a younger cast, set in 2023…”) and ChatGPT spits it out, almost instantly.
The technology itself was mind-blowing and almost immediately promised to replace everything we, as humans, take for granted – from journalists to Hollywood writers to the standard college essay. After all, with the naked eye, there is virtually no way to tell whether something was created by AI or written by a human. This issue not only set off alarm bells about the moral use of generative AI, but also a nearly five-month walkout from TV and movie writers, concerned that AI could wipe out their own use cases.
The fact is, as we learned last year, generative AI is much more than ChatGPT. It encompasses everything, from apps that record and transcribe conversations in meetings to apps that write email responses, create voiceovers and generate “original” art and logos. Generative AI has the power to create just about anything, offering the opportunity to save today’s businesses time and money, while creating new opportunities for growth and investment .
In fact, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, research has shown that AI generation features can total 4.4 trillion dollars to the global economy every year. No wonder it gets so much attention, for better or worse.
The year of the AI generation: how it’s going
Just months after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft announced that its Bing search engine would be to add a ChatGPT element. Even though the statement didn’t jumpstart Google from the top of the search engine rankings, it triggered a series of new announcements other tech giants rushing to join the AI generation game. In fact, the Bing/ChatGPT partnership launched a seemingly endless wave of Gen AI developments over a series of just a few months. Here are a few :
Microsoft
Microsoft announced a series of additional features OpenAI-powered elements, including the addition of new Copilot functionality for both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365.
The Copilot feature helps business and home users summarize and edit text, create a more casual tone for their emails, gain insights from datasets, and even create presentations based on the content created in other Microsoft applications such as Word and Excel. Microsoft has been adding features to its portfolio at a breakneck pace.
Google, even if it started slowly with a somewhat clumsy launch of Bard, was ultimately not left out. The company has started offering Duet, a technology similar to Copilot, which allows users to harness the power of Gen AI throughout Google Workspace, helping them write and even create custom visuals in presentations and more.
Google also launched Generative AI Studio, which allows developers to create their own generative AI applications with text and images, even if they are not very familiar with AI or machine learning. Last week, Google launched Gemini with an impressive demo that sparked excitement for the race to generation AI, while also raising questions about how much of the demo is actually feasible today.
Selling power
Salesforce announced Salesforce AI Cloud, which enables a more personalized sales CRM experience where sales teams can request automatically generated insights on improving the user experience during the customer journey; create personalized content for email, web and mobile; create responses for customer service teams; and generate personalized emails for customers. The company has built its history around the security of the data generated on its platform.
Adobe
Adobe announced that its Adobe Firefly would allow users to create images, 3D images, vectors and even audio and video content in one click. While language models have been the focus for much of 2023, image-based generative tools have big implications and Adobe is well-positioned to be the leader in this area.
Amazon Web Services
AWS joined the GenAI conversation this year, but made a splash in late 2023 at its reInvent conference by announcing not only its own Titan model, but also its open model approach as well as its new Q offering, which is perhaps the most simple, its LLM. for business. The company also launched its next-generation training chip, Trainium2.
IBM
IBM has announced the development of new platforms like its multi-faceted Watsonx to support more powerful AI core models. The company has also launched a wave of compensation offers for the use of GenAI tools, as the speed of innovation has created legal concerns around security, data rights and potential infringement. It was the first to market with this feature, just as it was also the first to bring its Watsonx enterprise offering to GA. .AI.
Nvidia
Nvidia dominated silicon for GenAI, seeing an unprecedented surge in demand for its most advanced GPUs as competitors raced to catch up. AMD just released its new GPU to give Nvidia some competition, while more efficient and less flexible chips from AWS, Google, Microsoft and Intel have also been adopted by the market.
We’ve also seen a growing focus on silicon for data transport and infrastructure, with companies like Broadcom and Marvell seeing a substantial increase in this focus. To be clear, silicon is at the heart of all these GenAI tools and innovation, supply and competition are very important here.
In other words: by early 2023, the tech world itself was practically synonymous with Gen AI. Never in history has another technology had so much impact, so quickly. And while this list contained many generative AI updates, it was far from comprehensive and only scratched the surface of the exciting companies that have an AI story to tell.
What the data says about the future of the AI generation
Over the past year, we’ve been closely tracking how AI and generative AI will proliferate in the enterprise. In November, our Futurum Intelligence team published its first ever AI decision maker in The Enterprise Study. By surveying over 1,000 enterprise AI decision-makers, we ranked 159 different AI deployment vendors, and the results are astonishing and very revealing. Here are some key points to remember.
- Across companies, we saw a more than 300% increase in the number of companies planning to invest multi-million dollars in GenAI in 2024 compared to 2023.
- The two main criteria for choosing vendors for GenAI projects were perceived AI expertise, and speed and timeline of implementation.
While the results are numerous, the TLDR shows that companies are increasing their investments at an incredibly rapid pace, while striving for faster implementation and time to value, both positive things for technology spending in 2024 and beyond, corresponding to the double-digit forecasts. CAGRs that have been reported by multiple sources for GenAI over the next five years.
The Year of the AI Generation: Beyond Commercialization, Where Do We Go From Here?
Over the past year, we’ve seen the AI generation grow further and faster than technologists probably imagined. This begs the question: where do we go from here?
Last month, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was ousted by company board, only to be reinstated less than a week later. This ousting hints at the general schism in AI development so far: dividing line The potential of AI to help humanity and its potential to end it altogether.
Something we can all agree on: Generation AI isn’t going anywhere.
Although issues surrounding “unsupervised AI” continue to surface, the technology is advancing far faster than the human ability to impose limits on it. This means that we will likely see the AI generation become even more accessible to the general public over the coming year. And, as we saw with last week’s passage of the EU AI law, we’ll hear more from leaders about regulation and compliance, given the pace of innovation by relation to the risk for consumers.
Overall, it is almost impossible to keep up with the rapid and almost daily advances in generative AI. As AMD CEO Lisa Su alluded to at the company’s Advancing AI event last week, this is the fastest pace of change the industry has ever seen – and we can safe to say that it will only accelerate from here on out. Exciting times ahead!