Advent of GenAI

To predict whether AI will make an impact in 2024 requires natural intelligence and a little data. Generative AI (GenAI) caught the fancy of all generations. Two months after launch, ChatGPT broke records as the fastest-growing consumer app in history, until Meta’s Threads overtook it. ChatGPT now has about one hundred million weekly active users while more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using the platform, according to OpenAI.

Investments into AI

Nvidia, the makers of chip that power training models for AI saw its market value shooting up by $800 billion making it the biggest percentage gainer among the large tech companies in the last year. According to AMD, Nvidia’s rival, market for AI chips for data centers would hit $400 billion by 2027, which is equal to the pre-covid global market size of all semiconductors. Companies like OpenAI building large language models attracted about $27 billion as per PitchBook. Goldman Sachs observes that investment in AI is just below 0.5% of GDP and estimate it to go beyond 2.5% of GDP by 2032. Will these investments result in improved productivity and better business results for users of AI? Looks like what happened during the gold rush when providers of mining equipment, tools and supplies made more profit than the people who managed to hit the gold!

Return of Investment

Tech companies are the earliest gainers from employee cost as several back-office jobs are getting replaced by AI. Study by Stanford author Brynjolfsson found that average productivity of call center workers rose by 14% within a few weeks of using the AI infused technology. Interesting thing to note is that the gains were 35% for lowest skill level workers. Lower the skill levels, higher the gains to the business as those jobs become extinct. The focus now is on how best to aitomate (‘ai’ based tools to automate tasks – my own terminology) tasks that can boost productivity. It is going to be a while before we see a real killer app based on AI that can fetch several fold returns.

Cautious Business and Road Blocks

Spending on Gen AI this year will not be more than $20 billion, which is just one fifth of the spend on IT security according to Gartner. Businesses will scale up spend over the next few years after a lot of trial and errors resulting in monetizable Aipps (‘AI’ based apps – again my own terminology). While the technology is progressing from Artificial Narrow Intelligence to Artificial General Intelligence, issues such as hallucination, bias, deep fakes, ethics besides the cost are to be controlled for AI to take over as pilot from just being co-pilot.

A Flashback

Recently, I landed upon a photograph of mine talking at a round table conference in early 90’s on Artificial Intelligence at the Vishakhapatnam chapter of ’The Institution of Engineers’. Three decades back, I led a team to develop an ‘Expert Mine Planning System’ at Ramco Systems, India with ‘expert systems’ approach in the blasting module. Expert systems emulate human decision making by reasoning through specific body of knowledge represented within system as ‘if-then-else’ rather than through procedural code. A technical paper about the system was accepted at the XXIV APCOM (Application of Computers and Operations Research in the Mineral Industries) conference held during Oct 31- Nov 3, 1993, at Montreal, Canada. Internationally well-known commercial vendors of ‘Mine Planning’ systems took serious note of our product and were surprised that such a product development was happening in India while the entire Indian IT was actually waiting for the Y2K to happen to get global recognition.

Narrow, not Super

Developments in cloud and big data over the decades have paved way for the current avatars of GenAI and AI has become a household term hallucinating between fake and real. Arrival of Aepps (Emotional Intelligence aware artificial intelligence apps – now you know that this is my terminology too) in times to come can catapult AI into the next generation. My comments are of ’narrow’ trending towards ‘general’ but not ‘super’ going by the categories of Artificial Intelligence.