The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 served as a precursor for an eventful year of technological advancement in 2023. Companies sought to be part of the ever-growing group of generative AI chatbot practitioners, while developers constructed agents to execute specific jobs such as booking trips or buying gifts. In terms of commercial success, Nvidia was the undisputed victor, as numerous creators of AI models quickly acquired the firm's highly-advanced graphics processing units.
In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT as a research project, which ended up being the defining moment for generative artificial intelligence. This surge of interest ultimately led to increased investments and a multitude of new products and services by 2023. As a result, generative AI algorithms became commonplace in many industries, particularly in the energy and utility sector, where 95% of companies are discussing using them. In the first three quarters of 2023, Nvidia benefitted from this trend, increasing its net income sixfold and its stock price by 237%. Despite this success, Chegg reported in May that ChatGPT had a negative impact on their new customer growth rate, which caused their stock to plunge 48%. OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, was temporarily ousted from his role due to disputes over his push for new commercial products, however, staff and investors fought to reinstate him. Throughout the year, there was an ongoing debate between AI skeptics and evangelists, while real-life harms were demonstrated. Finally, there were many advancements for generative AI in 2023, especially in various applications for businesses.
ChatGPT's launch opened the door for further investment in chatbots, as it became evident that brief inputs could result in more nuanced and productive responses than ever before. By two months after launch, it had set an unprecedented record as the most rapidly-growing consumer app until Meta's Threads regained the crown last summer. Currently, approximately 100 million people are making use of the platform each week, plus 92% of Fortune 500 businesses have adopted it, as reported by OpenAI. During the beginning of the year, Microsoft injected an additional $10 billion into the company, constituting the biggest AI investment of the year, per PitchBook. Furthermore, OpenAI's proposed employee stock sale would suggest a evaluation of $86 billion. According to Bloomberg, the talks are ongoing to potentially raise capital at an evaluation of over $100 billion.Google seemed taken aback by ChatGPT's success and hastened the public launch of its Bard chatbot with the help of its LaMDA Language Model. Recent Bard developments comprise integrations with Google Search and YouTube plus the launch of Gemini, the new and talked-about AI model assisting it. Gemini's introduction caused quite a stir, and it became even more discussed due to an altered video promoting its abilities.Also in the AI world, Anthropic, a startup of former OpenAI research executives, is negotiating to raise $750 million with an evaluation of $18.4 billion. In July, Anthropic showed off Claude 2, a chatbot that can summarize up to 75,000 words, the length of one book. People can feed huge datasets into it and request for summaries in the form of a note, letter or tale.This year has witnessed the utilization of new generative AI chatbots in answering queries about business strategy, designing study materials, delivering advice on remuneration negotiation and encouraging creative writing. Even weddings vows were written with the help of them.“This is among the most influential transformations in technology in recent times,” Jill Chase from CapitalG Ventures told CNBC. According to her, it ranks with the advent of the internet and the switch to mobile. “It really gets the imagination of folks going,” she said.All the same, scholars and ethicists have been vocal in their concerns about the invention of fabricated information and the perpetuation of bias. Regardless, it is being used widely in educational establishments, travel, the medical profession, digital marketing and more. Microsoft and IBM have both invested heavily in the enterprise AI market, including development studios for firms that want to personalize LLMs.On the other hand, authors, artists, writers and technologists have tried to sue the makers of popular generative AI tools, due to their claim that their creative content is being utilized as a free source of training data. John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and other prominent authors went to court against OpenAI in September for alleged copyright violation.
In 2022, generative AI for images and video experienced a surge in popularity due to emergences of powerful image generators such as OpenAI's DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and AI video-generation tools from Meta, Google and Amazon. However, Brendan Burke, an analyst at PitchBook, noted that interest in those technologies has since dwindled in comparison to the advancement of chatbots. "The speed at which multimedia content generation is progressing is lagging behind language," said Burke. "The initial hype over Stable Diffusion that year exposed both the public interest and the shortcomings of AI content generation. Much of what we have seen since then has been incremental progress, but it is still not enough for the demand of content creation."Meta recently launched a feature on their Instagram account that enables users to change the backgrounds of their Stories posts using AI. Additionally, Google and Amazon have incorporated generative AI into their advertising technology to generate more attractive marketing images.Notably, some industry leaders are of the opinion that the future of AI is in its "multimodal" applications, combining all the different mediums. Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's operating chief, stated in an interview with CNBC, "The world is multimodal. As humans, we process it visually, aurally, orally. Text and code should not be the only mediums by which we can access the potential of these models and what they can do."
Following the chatbot is the AI agent. It is not only about getting sophisticated responses, but also about using generative AI to be effective in accomplishing tasks. This could include arranging a group hangout by examining everybody's timetable to check that there are no collisions, booking trips and activities, buying presents for close ones, or doing a particular job function such as outbound sales. In the past month, OpenAI announced custom GPTs, or personalized, specialty forms of ChatGPT that customers can customize for getting travel recommendations, recipe aid or startup advice. However, the company elected to hold off on the launch of the platform that would popularize various use cases—the "GPT store"—until next year. One kind of AI assistant that has become widespread is for coding. For instance, Microsoft's GitHub coding repository. GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke wrote in a blog post earlier this year that an average of 46% of all code on GitHub, "across all programming languages," was AI generated. Last month, GitHub introduced a pricier version of its Copilot assistant that can explain and provide advice about internal source code. Kyle Daigle, GitHub's chief operating officer, told CNBC in an interview that "Copilot, when it started at the very beginning, was thought to be a tool that could help developers write docs." He said that during the past year, the company has broadened the technology, searching for more places "to assist developers collaborate and work together and address issues outside of simply the code." Nevertheless, PitchBook's Burke said coding assistants are still in their earliest stages and presently are only able to do "a small part" of a developer's job. He said that is also true in the larger world. "Users have seen how little AI can do for them this year," he said. "AI knows a great deal, but it can't do much yet. We're still a long way from AI actually being able to do the intricate tasks that people are accustomed to doing in their personal lives and at work. That has been revealed by the challenges of AI agents this year."
2023 was a year of tremendous consumer buzz around generative AI and adoption of certain products, but not many businesses had success. Grace Isford of Lux Capital commented that, "AI is nothing new, but the awareness and use of it have grown astronomically. People are leveraging the technology and developing tangible products." CapitalG's Chase mentioned that AI has let people have a preview of what could be achievable. They have attempted to create long-term use cases despite the early adoption of particular products not leading to general popularity. Nvidia was the main beneficiary of the excitement of the sector. For the following year and beyond, companies need to prove the expensive GPU models can lead to profitable products. Burke said that he expected the immediate translation of AI into production but realized few companies have done so. It will likely be late in 2021 or 2022 before businesses use them in large scale. in 2024
Don't overlook these stories from CNBC PRO:Experts on Wall Street make a prediction: Where they anticipate the stock market to be in 2024Where to allocate $50K leading up to 2024, according to market specialistsMorgan Stanley suggests 'plain' non-AI technology stocks for 2024. Here are its top global selectionsBank of America outlines its 4 best biotech choices for 2024 — with one giving 166% returnsCD rates are falling. Here are the highest yields for 2024
top of page
bottom of page
Comments