17 April 2023
You wake up, not by a jarring alarm in your ears, but slowly and scientifically. The lighting slowly awakens your senses and temperature is set to the perfect degree. You have your breakfast designed by the Artifical Intelligence (AI) kitchen bot, optimised for peak nutrition and to your taste and body type while perusing the news, highly curated as per your specific interests. You get into your car ready to start your day. The car that turned up at your doorstep automatically is now also fully optimized as per your preferences. It’s a brand new day for you as the CEO of your technology startup. You get on to business, looking up an analysis of data, insights and recommendations on what you should be focusing on for your startup today in addition to a crisp synopsis that is created by your personal assistant, powered by AI.
You get into meetings with colleagues across the world, with a virtual assistant seamlessly translating the conversations that are taking place in multiple languages. Things are looking good at the home front too. You aren’t worried about your child, because she/he is sorted with an AI tutor that is able to simulate and create environments best suited to her/his developmental needs.
This is not a scene from a sci-fi movie set in the future. This is a very probable simulation of your life in as close as 2030.
This shows that, it is not just our life that will be changing, society as a whole and the industry as you know too, is evolving rapidly. Be it technology, financial services, healthcare, entertainment, art, travel – everything, everywhere and all at once! While we have had several once-in-a-century type experiences over the last few years, 2023 is the start of the AI revolution and we are lucky to be witnessing this inflection point.
With the premise that we are now aware of the disruption that is coming, how is it likely to play out?
First stage is disrupting the information brokers. Generative AI is your super talented co-worker who researches for you, writes code and even helps you with your emails. In effect, a formidable ally who cuts the chase with the sharpest information that you need. For example: “what is the best mutual fund beating the index growth for last 3 years?”
Second stage is disrupting the rapidity to action. Once Generative AI syncs up with your life and proliferates to devices, it will enable you to act with celerity to convert your creative ideas into action. Creating a pitchbook for generating new clients, running financial projections or communicating with top brokers is done in a jiffy. You are now a Super-human in a way!
The largest employer in today’s world is inefficiency and with time, the quantum of inefficiencies that AI will take away from our lives will be directly proportional to the non-linear economic value that we will create.
Third stage is the disrupting the reasoning. With the speed of transformation and the explosion of the information that it is processing, it is not far-fetched to think that it will soon possess enough cognitive sense to prompt you to take a specific action. An advisor with an impressive suggestive layer that understands your priority and has the context of the situation to let you know the right thing to do. Are we at Artificial Super Intelligence yet?
Well very soon we will live in a world where we will be free to pursue creativity as machines take over the repetitive, mundane, and arduous tasks. Life will be exciting, fast-paced, and full of innovation. Who knows, we may actually be able to solve world hunger!
Here’s what the generative AI landscape could look like, straight from horse’s mouth – ChatGPT:
A bit on the tech that lies beneath
Introduction of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) by a leading search engine marked the beginning of the Generative AI era. A few advancements later, a few researchers from Stanford saw the field of AI converge into a new paradigm. Foundation Models were born when certain deep learning models trained on broad data (using self-supervision at scale) started demonstrating surprising emergent capabilities and could be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks.
Thrust to cloud
While the hype about generative AI at the remarkable shift it has caused, is real, keeping this alive and progressive requires massive amount of computing power which is almost impossible to imagine on a regular on-premises infra. Companies, therefore, are likely to accelerate their journey to cloud as they explore and absorb its vast capability to create a hyper-personalized AI for their enterprise.
It’s therefore not surprising to see this at the center of the sales pitches of all the big three technology giants, who were reeling from the decline in their cloud sales growth compared to last year. While the first and second wave of journey to cloud were on the back of infrastructure and SaaS offerings, the impetus for this wave is going to be AI powered creativity on the cloud
As we stand poised on the cusp of a new era, there is an unmissable sense of excitement and wonder about the possibilities that Generative AI presents.
However, much like when internet first emerged, the sentiment towards generative AI is slightly complex and nuanced. It involves a reality where potential benefits are juxtaposed with a bit of caution owing to risks such as bias & fairness, misinformation, data leaks, responsible and ethical use, all in regulated environments amongst others.
Now that we have woken up to the fact that the possibilities with Generative AI are only limited by our creativity, the question that remains is What is an “impossible” problem you want to solve?
A version of this article was published on 17 April, 2023 by Communications Today Magazine