Investors, look out; the future is here, and Chatbots are taking over. AI has the potential to drastically change various industries, including healthcare, finance, transportation, and many more. Generic Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of technology’s most promising areas, which could be here for the long term.
Generic Artificial Intelligence, or just general AI, is a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capable of performing any intellectual task a human can perform. This encompasses anything from language processing and machine learning to computer vision.
Competition in the generic Artificial Intelligence (AI) space is heating up at an alarming pace, with Alphabet’s DeepMind and Microsoft’s OpenAI seemingly leading the charge.
Let’s cut in line and look at these two AI research laboratory market leaders:
DeepMind
Let’s rewind to the beginning of the AI revolution when DeepMind’s AlphaGo was the talk of the town in 2016 when it became the first computer program to beat a professional human Go player. DeepMind Reinforcement Learning enables computers to go beyond traditional competencies, such as winning humans at games and predicting how proteins can fold themselves into specific shapes.
The wholly owned subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc has been thrust back into the limelight to see how the search engine will compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Alphabet’s response to Microsoft’s now famous chatbot came in the form of a “Code Red” issued by the CEO Sundar Pichai to ramp up the company’s AI efforts. In an unprecedented move, the code red alert saw the co-founders and ex-co-CEOs summoned to an emergency meeting to discuss Google’s response to ChatGPT.
Enter LaMDA, Google’s first-generation large language model, which introduced its answer to ChatGPT this February called Bard. In a rush to get the AI product to market, it has not been smooth sailing for Bard, which suffered a demoralising demo last month. Luckily for Alphabet enthusiasts, the company is firing on all cylinders, which has seen its latest offering from DeepMind, called Sparrow, come in as another contender in the chatbot space. DeepMind’s Sparrow will endeavour to answer users’ questions correctly while reducing the risk of unsafe and inappropriate answers.
OpenAI
OpenAI’s GPT3 chatbot, ChatGPT, has grabbed the world’s attention and focused firmly on generic Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the next Thematic investment case. OpenAI was a non-profit founded by a couple of industry heavyweights, like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, to name a few. Musk, however, resigned from the board in 2018 and has recently articulated his discomfort with how advanced AI has become and that this should worry us “One of the biggest risks to the future of civilisation is AI,”.
Today, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) owns 49% of OpenAI after its multibillion-dollar investment and other investments into AI technologies, such as its Azure AI platform and cognitive services. The Microsoft and OpenAI relationship should place the tech giant firmly in the driving seat across the AI industry as it seeks to take search market share from Google.
The partnership will see OpenAI use Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform and, in return, see Microsoft become OpenAI’s exclusive partner. Their vision is to democratise AI and make it accessible to everyone to try and solve the world’s major problems, like climate change, healthcare and education.
Sources: OpenAI, DeepMind, AlphaGo, Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet Inc, Reuters, Bloomberg, Changing Social, Distinguished, CNBC
