A hot generative AI summer is here. Get ready to sweat

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In this week's AI Beat, I recalled how a year ago, the phrase “generative AI” had rarely appeared among the flood of jargon in my inbox.?

In July 2022, I had received a few missives from Meta about a multimodal “generative AI” prototype called “Make-A-Scene,” and a handful of emails that referenced “generative AI” text-to-image models like DALL·E and Imagen. But I’m pretty sure the term “generative AI” was not uttered from the stage at last July’s VentureBeat Transform, our annual flagship event focused on applied AI for enterprise business and technology decision-makers.

What a difference a year makes. When OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released on November 30,?generative AI?had barely started to trend in Google search. But throughout the winter and spring of 2023, it began to explode —?and has climbed the charts ever since. There was the conga line of generative AI?productivity apps. Google and Microsoft’s competing announcements about?Bard?and?Bing. An open-source AI?coming-out?celebration.?Massive funding rounds?for companies developing the LLMs that build generative AI apps. And, of course, Nvidia’s?massive success?providing GPU compute to power the whole gen AI party.?

These days, gen AI is part of the cultural zeitgeist and a pivotal part of any discussion about?AI and ML, whether it is about investment, applications, infrastructure, security, open source, regulation or ethics. Other than Apple, which studiously?stayed?away?from the term, “generative AI” was?mentioned dozens of times?in every Big Tech earnings report this quarter. VC firms have unceremoniously thrown “metaverse,” “blockchain” and “Web3” to the curb, greedily gobbling up “generative AI” as their latest investment craze.

Generative AI: More than hype

Even skeptics believe that generative AI is more than the latest season of hype. For example, a recent Domino Data Lab?survey?of?data science?leaders found that 90% believe that the hype surrounding generative AI is justified, while more than half believe it will have a significant impact on their business within the next one to two years.

And now, a hot generative AI summer is here. Get ready to sweat, because the technology shows no signs of slowing down through the dog days of July and August. Silicon Valley isn’t going on vacation anytime soon —?not when the future of AI success is at stake. And for enterprise companies, the journey to harness gen AI is just beginning. As noted by our CEO and editor-in-chief Matt Marshall last week, “they face daunting challenges in transforming their processes, systems and cultures to embrace this new paradigm. And they need to act fast to develop an ‘operating system’ for generative AI, before their competitors gain an edge.”

That’s where this year’s?VentureBeat?Transform, “Get Ahead of the Generative AI Revolution,” comes in. I’m heading to San Francisco to get ready for the July 11-12 event, which will be the first significant independent event for enterprise leaders who want to learn how to leverage generative AI and data technology to transform their businesses — and how to manage its?risks and challenges.

That’s right: This year’s Transform will be?all?about gen AI. How could it not be? From our Women in AI breakfast that kicks off the conference, to the panels, fireside chats, roundtables and AI Innovation Awards that follow, we’ll be gathering in person to tackle the generative AI topics everyone is talking about.?

When I think back to last summer, it’s almost as if we were on the cusp of a heat wave. The signs were there, in the text-to-image gen AI tools like DALL·E 2 that were showing flashes of what was to come. But it wasn’t until ChatGPT burst on the scene that the world got a sense of how generative AI applications could potentially impact so many aspects of our lives — from the workplace and education to politics and entertainment.?

This summer, the heat is on — and everyone, it seems, has a fever for whatever is coming in generative AI. At VentureBeat’s Transform, we’re here for it all. Join me (and colleagues including CEO and editor-in-chief Matt Marshall, editorial director Michael Nu?ez, GamesBeat editor Dean Takahashi and news editor Carl Franzen) in San Francisco next week and get fired up.

And...check out some of our top AI coverage over the past week:

AWS exec downplays existential threat of AI, calls it a ‘mathematical parlor trick’

AWS had been working on AI long before the current round of generative AI hype with its?Sagemaker product suite?leading the charge for the last six years. Make no mistake about it, though: AWS has joined the generative AI era like everyone else. Back on April 13, AWS announced?Amazon Bedrock, a set of generative AI tools that can help organizations build, train, fine tune and deploy large language models (LLMs).

There is no doubt that there is great power behind generative AI. It can be a disruptive force for enterprise and society alike. That great power has led some experts to warn that AI represents an?“existential threat”?to humanity. But in an interview with VentureBeat, Wood handily dismissed those fears, succinctly explaining how AI actually works and what AWS is doing with it.

Capital One’s new chief scientist says ‘responsible, thoughtful’ generative AI is key

When Prem Natarajan, Capital One’s new chief scientist and head of enterprise AI, came on board in May — after five years as a VP at Amazon, leading the Alexa AI organization — it was because he was intrigued. What was in the DNA, he wondered, of one of the largest banks in the U.S. and one with a reputation for a strong technology focus, that could help it succeed in implementing?generative AI?and?large language models (LLMs)?in a responsible, thoughtful way?

“Capital One was emerging in so many conversations as a big, forward-leaning investor in technology that was one of the first major companies to go all in on the cloud,” Natarajan told VentureBeat in a recent interview. Capital One “offered me a great balance for [the] next phase [of my career] — to contribute using my expertise but to learn about the new challenges that lie at the intersection of [generative AI] and the new set of customer and business problems.”

Inside the race to build an ‘operating system’ for generative AI

Generative AI, the technology that can auto-generate anything from text, to images, to full application code, is reshaping the business world. It promises to unlock new sources of value and innovation, potentially adding $4.4 trillion to the global economy, according to a recent report by?McKinsey.?

But for many enterprises, the journey to harness?generative AI?is just beginning. They face daunting challenges in transforming their processes, systems and cultures to embrace this new paradigm. And they need to act fast, before their competitors gain an edge.