Generative AI phenomenon

AI/ML has been one of the most talked about technology. Till now it was a capability restricted to and used by a few big tech companies or few application developers. OpenAI with the launch of its ChatGPT tool and similar other open source tools has opened the floodgates to make it accessible to general public and use it for different applications with ease. It basically is going to democratize the use/development of AI for applications catering to literally every different aspect of Human life. Since second half of last year (2022) which is when ChatGPT and other similar tools got opened to all, it has led to use of ChatGPT for different types of applications and create different innovative offering based on these tools. Coming days are going to be pretty exciting to see some very creative and innovative apps coming out leading to huge value creation for application users, developers and overall ecosystem.

Generative AI systems generates content that is on the similar lines as the input data they are trained on. Generative AI is based on Large Language models (LLMs). LLMs are trained on tons of data from the internet and other sources. LLMs produce human like responses to a query (like prompt). It can be used to generate text, images, video, music and other forms. Generative AI is going to bring in new types of automation given its ability to take natural language based input, process it semantically and generate an output. Automation in the past has been mainly focused on automating repetitive tasks and less on cognitive knowledge based tasks. Generative AI is in fact going to have impact on Highly skilled professions and tasks as against the low skilled ones. Given this there are concerns about its impact on the jobs. Just like any new automation technology brings in productivity gain and also leads to work force reduction concerns, it is going to lead to need for people with different & newer types of skill set. It is going to be interesting and important to see what changes it is going to bring in to different industries and professions going forward.

Generative AI generated Image

ChatGPT is just one of the LLM model based Generative AI tool developed by OpenAI. It has been trained on a massive amount of text data from the internet and can generate human-like text responses to a given prompt. It can answer questions, converse on a variety of topics, and generate creative writing pieces. While it has been touted to be used for such conversation oriented applications, GPT models can also be used in the background to analyze, summarize, and process large amounts of human readable text to get valuable insights out of it and short span of time.

Recent Mckinsey Report (link) on "Economic potential of Generative AI" gives a good insight on the impact it is going to have. Generative AI could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion to the global economy annually (roughly 2 percent to 4 percent of the world’s combined gross domestic product this year), according to a new report. Four sets of activities: sales and marketing, software engineering, customer operations, and product research and development represent 75 percent of total potential economic gains.

Source: Mckinsey & Company report

Gartner too has listed Generative AI in their "Emerging Technologies and Trends 2022" report.

Source: Gartner Emerging Tech and Trends 2022 report

To summarize in the end Generative AI is going to have significant impact on different industries and profession. It is going to be a new type of automation with potential to have much bigger impact. It will have to be seen what changes it brings in. Things are still in early days, some niggling issues are still to be sorted out and products and services based on generative AI have just started to trickle in.