The Gold Rush of AI Systems Begins Now!
The slow rise of Natural Language Processing.
When Google first launched, people typing in the search query “please give me today’s weather” would be considered unusual, because that’s what it was a query. “You don’t talk to a computer!” was the generally accepted view. Slowly and steadily, these queries have been moving closer and closer to questions.
“Natural Language Processing” was the key phrase. The goal was that the systems to be able to understand how people talk in their regular daily life. The complex neural networks, machine learning algorithms were developed for this purpose. The idea is that instead of teaching the computer how to understand, we give it the tools to learn how to understand. We take humans out of the equation. Instead of teaching it languages, we teach the computer how to detect patterns and learn from those patterns it themselves, occasionally intervening to tweak the importance, the weight, given to each data source point.
With the vast information hoard this is the internet an AI system, with enough computing resource thrown at it, can skim through it for data points, resources reports and interpretations to arrive at the results for any problem, question or challenge presented to it, provided there is a way for the AI to understand that was originally designed for human consumption.
The early signs of internet’s permeability.
The internet as we know it first started as the tool to store, share and improve the data among the many of computing systems that universities and research organisations around the world. By design from the beginning, the internet is meant to be a wealth of data and knowledge. From there, the early internet companies ran businesses that monetized the storage and distribution of any information that can be digitised. Napster was the first indication of its permeability and the scale of adoption; open internet could have on the general public. You did not need to be a research scholar to use the internet. If you are interested in music, you would go to a website and download the song of your liking. You tried new songs of other artists in the same genres, or maybe found older more obscure songs of your favourite artist, you found your niche. Napster had over 80 million registered users at its peak. Today, services like Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music and a myriad of other streaming platforms provide the same convenience to the end user while having an equitable distribution and profitable business online for the music industry. Spotify had 433 million unique active users in Q3 of 2022.
The widespread adoption of Napster was a game-changer. It showed that people were willing to embrace new technology that could make their lives easier and more convenient. It also demonstrated that the internet had the potential to be a powerful tool for connecting people and sharing information on a global scale.
A new revolution on the horizon.
Fast forward to today, and we may be witnessing another technological revolution, this time with AI. We seem to be on the cusp of the AI revolutions that has been promised by the tech industry for many years now. Google had revealed their Duplex and Lambda systems on in their developer conference couple of year ago.
Google Lambda is their natural language processing model, that is designed to understand human prompts, words, phrases and language patterns, and extract meaning from it and then reply with a meaningful and useful information for the user.
Google Duplex on the other hand is their system that mimics human speech patterns and behaviours. It was capable of receiving and making phone calls, hold conversations and reach a meaningful conclusion for the instructions given to it by the user.
While these systems and their capabilities were impressive, they were still on the horizon for general public consumption and had extensive limitations on how you could implement them. In such a situation, OpenAI ‘s Chat GPT was released to the public. Chat GPT 3, a language model that is one of the most advanced examples of AI technology. It is capable of generating human-like responses to text prompts, and its potential applications are endless. The first and the easiest application seems to be “Search Engine”. Much like the adoption of Napster in the early dot com era of the internet, the Chat GPT is being used across the board. Chat GPT’s unique ability to perform human centric conversations, while at the same time scour the internet for vast amounts of relevant data and information has been combined to be the next big search engine.
This is further bolstered by how quickly Microsoft has adopted the features of Chat GPT into its “New Bing” Search feature. The feature is being adapted to be more widely accepted, personalised and be palatable for everyone around the world. And it is expected by Microsoft to implement this Artificial Intelligence abilities in more of its products such as the Microsoft Office Suite.
Much like Napster was the first indication of the permeability and scale of adoption of the internet, Chat GPT 3 may be the first indication of the revolution that AI could bring to everyday life. As more people become aware of its capabilities, it is likely that we will see an explosion in the use of AI technology in a range of fields.
Just as the internet took over the world in the 2000s, the smart phone took over the world in the 2010s, we are the cusp of the AI systems taking over in the 2020s…. Artificial Intelligence is expected to permeate every facet of the modern life, and there is a gold rush expected for the many many niches of the world. From manufacturing industries looking to optimise, marketing industry looking for innovative ways to reach masses, from the logistics industry rewriting their playbooks to content creators writing their scripts in hours instead of days, there is over abundance of opportunities for new AI systems to be created.
Microsoft launching Bing Search with the GPT language model prompted the Google to announce their own chat-based search capable, AI system that can answer user’s questions called Google Bard. And it is expected that the Google Workspace Suite of apps is expected to get AI treatment in making them more user friendly.
A gold rush of AI systems for every niche.
With each new niche being created for an AI system to come to into existence, more and more developers, programmers, and rapid iterations of these AI software are required to be ahead of the gold rush. The demand for Testing tools, Cloud Systems Management, Development Process Optimisation, Data Security, Vulnerability Checks, all of these processes are significantly higher in development of each AI system, and the market is only expected to grow to newer heights with the rapid increase in demand for more of these systems to be built. The most efficient teams that can deploy their systems quicker, safer and have fewer errors would easily be the winner in this race. CloudZenix can be your partner in this race, giving you the right tools, back-end support and the right pipeline in developing your AI system that can quickly and efficiently.
