When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), the advances we saw in 2021 pale in comparison to those that occurred last year, and AI shows no signs of slowing down. Industries from financial services to healthcare to manufacturing are adopting AI-enabled solutions to restructure how they operate as well as to solve previously intractable problems. Building on my AI predictions from last year, in this article I will explore five ways in which AI is poised to transform our society in the near future.
1. Generative AI will keep ramping.
Generative AI had an explosive year in 2022. Popular systems like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney can produce incredibly detailed images from a text prompt in a matter of seconds, irrevocably altering the landscape of graphic design. Tools like ChatGPT allow users to converse with a highly capable chatbot capable of answering questions, composing emails, creating code and even writing entire essays from scratch. The changes from previous iterations of Generative AI have been staggering—DALL-E 2’s picture-perfect generations are leaps and bounds above its predecessor, despite less than a two-year gap between the release of the models.
I expect the technology to continue improving at a parabolic pace. Google recently showcased its text-to-video AI model, which is likely to increase output quality at least as (if not more) quickly as DALL-E 2 has done. GPT-4 has already been announced by OpenAI, and there have been increasing hints that the technology will have multimodal capabilities, able to function across images, texts and sounds all at once. A multimodal AI would be capable of building new business models that could open the door for jobs and opportunities that we couldn’t even imagine a year ago.