The revolutionary content-producing platform ChatGPT has sparked a flurry of investments into the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. After Google, Alibaba, and Tesla boss Elon Musk, listed among the world’s leading tech giants, jumped onboard with their own versions of the technology, companies and investors from Singapore to Silicon Valley eagerly poured in billions of dollars into the sector, leading some analysts to draw comparison to the dot-com boom.
Generative AI, as the technology is called, has been quickly integrated into customer service, marketing, and software development, creating enormous enthusiasm for it among early adopters. David Foster, co-founder of Applied Data Science Partners, a London-based AI and data consultancy, iterated how generative AI could affect the future of humanity as much as the internet has.
In a research done by Deutsche Bank, it was found that the global corporate investment towards AI has grown 150%, reaching $180 billion in the year 2021, while the number of projects has risen to nearly 350,000. An even more intelligent program, ChatGPT-4 was released last month, and version 5 will be out by the end of 2021. AutoGPT, another advancement that further automates tasks that ChatGPT needs human input for, was launched last month as well.
China is slowly catching up with the US in terms of generative AI development and is now responsible for 18% of all high-impact AI projects, according to Deutsche Bank. However, AI experts, including Max Tegmark, professor at MIT, are more concerned about the race by Western tech giants to take the technology too far, without providing enough regulations for it. This situation sparked the European Union to start working on the Artificial Intelligence Act, due to be enacted this year.
However, Europe is lagging in AI growth due to investors leaning towards a more risk-averse approach. To narrow this gap, Germany proposed an AI infrastructure called LEAM, and Aleph Alpha, a Heidelberg-based startup, has attracted $31.1 million worth of investment, though it’s still far from OpenAI’s $11 billion.
OpenAI is the research and development company that released ChatGPT in November 2020. This company is working on developing human-level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and is backed by leading tech giants, with investments amounting to billions of dollars. This project is aiming to create a platform which will enable robotics and virtual agents to interact with humans in a natural way and power future intelligent systems. This revolutionary program can also be employed to automate various jobs, thus changing the way we do our day-to-day activities.
