AI - What's New?

Last January, a New York Times article had said, "The AI industry this year is set to be defined by one main characteristic: a remarkably rapid improvement of the technology as advancements build upon one another, enabling AI to generate new kinds of media, mimic human reasoning in new ways and seep into the physical world through a new breed of robot".

Let us decode this.

Multimedia Chatbots - chatbots will expand well beyond digital text by handling photos, videos, diagrams, charts and other media. They will exhibit behavior that looks more like human reasoning, tackling increasingly complex tasks in fields like math and science. When OpenAI debuted a new version of ChatGPT last year, the chatbot could generate images as well as text. Multimodal AI systems learn skills by analyzing photos, text and potentially other kinds of media, including diagrams, charts, sounds and video, so they can then produce their own text, images and sounds.

AI Agents - As companies teach AI systems how to work through complex problems one step at a time, they can also improve the ability of chatbots to use software apps and websites on your behalf. Chatbots can behave as autonomous agents. That means they can use software apps, websites and other online tools, including spreadsheets, online calendars and travel sites. People could then offload tedious office work to these chatbots. But these agents could also take away jobs entirely. This might include keeping track of expenses in an app like QuickBooks or logging vacation days in an app like Workday. In the long run, it will extend beyond software and internet services and into the world of robotics.

Instant Videos - So far AI powered applications such as DALL-E and Midjourney are creating static images based on text prompts. Soon these tools can instantly deliver videos as well as still images. Such functions will gradually merge into chatbots like ChatGPT.

Better "Reasoning" - Future AI systems can carefully and logically solve a problem through a series of discrete steps, each one building on the next. That is how humans reason, at least in some cases. OpenAI and others are building systems that can more reliably answer complex questions involving subjects like math, computer programming, physics and other sciences. This area may talk a longer time to develop.

Smarter Robots - Just as chatbots can learn to predict the next word in a sentence by analyzing vast amounts of digital text, a robot can learn to predict what will happen in the physical world by analyzing countless videos of objects being prodded, lifted and moved. Robots will have the power to handle more complex tasks - including those they have never seen before.

We do see rapid progress in AI this year. According to CBInsights, AI startups raised $42.5B in 2023. Generative AI attracted 48% of this funding. Slowly the focus is shifting to enterprise-level deployment of GenAI and LLM for significant productivity gains.