What’s different about AI this time?

With breakthroughs in AI using deep learning and transformer models over the past decade the hype is at its peak! There will undoubtedly be a correction in expectation but there is something different this time. I call it “AI prevalence”.

When Google’s search engine launched in 1998, only a few recognized its disruptive potential for the internet. By the time Universal Search capability was added in 2007, “let’s google it” was the de facto standard for finding information on the internet.

I think the launch of ChatGPT was a similar moment in history. It is the best natural language interface yet and it is continuously improving. For the first time, AI is in any internet-using household and very tangible. Yes, Facebook and TikTok, among others, have had sophisticated AI capability for years, but that was working in the background.

There is something very real about a cursor blinking on your screen and rapidly generating an answer to your question which can live up to your expectation. This visibility of AI is slowly but surely going to start influencing our behavior and use of AI technology.

It is this prevalence of AI that has started a virtuous cycle of more investment into AI, that will make it more capable, and is resulting in increased adoption and use.

Much like how writing a search query into Google was a skill, prompting generative AI is the same, but that will normalize as capability improves, just like Google search queries did. And with techniques like Retrieval Augmented Generation, you are really backing up this capable natural language interface with accurate knowledge about highly complex and specific contexts. Then you think of text-to-speech or images, and subsequently video, and all the possibilities that arise, we are at the start of another fundamental shift which we will only be able to feel in years to come.

We can choose to remain skeptical or on the other extreme, make brave predictions about when Artificial General Intelligence will take over masses of human jobs. I personally find that using technology and understanding its capability helps you apply it for your own efficiency and continually adapt your skills to remain relevant. So, while I’m certain that it will be some time before AI makes masses of jobs redundant, I encourage you to understand how capable AI is to support you today and embrace that capability knowing that when today’s complex problems are solved by technology, humans will naturally find the next frontier of complexity to focus on.

This is the culture we are adopting at IFS, leveraging decades of mature AI capability to solve specific problems for our target industries, such as in the field of scheduling optimization, and using innovation such as generative AI as a capable natural language interface to help surface and summarize complex and technical information.

And of course, we’re using it to help boost our own internal productivity too!

Like this and what to find out more?

Visit IFS.ai and check out research from MIT CISR on the AI-powered organization to find out more! IFS is a patron of MIT CISR.

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