Generative AI: Truth Or Hype?

Al has taken the world by storm. Who stands to gain the most from it?

- Anand Tandon

The past few quarters have been among the most volatile in economic terms. US interest rates have hardened by over 500 per cent as inflation reached levels not seen for decades. Central Banks reversed course to reduce balance sheets (quantitative tightening). Simultaneously, tight labour markets persisted, even as major economies headed into recession (Germany tipped over in the second week of June). The US economy is expected to descend into one in the second half of the year. Despite all these extremes, the one occurrence (not involving geopolitics) that is likely to have a long-term and persistent impact is the introduction of large language models that can replace much that is performed by human effort, including creativity.

Accenture, in a report, writes, “The meteoric rise of ChatGPT has captivated the world’s attention on the power of generative AI to augment human capability”. ChatGPT received over 200 million unique users per month within five months of launch and averages over 30 million active users per day. Bard, Google’s answer to Microsoft, has been delayed and has less than 5 per cent of the traffic.

A report by Gartner in December 2022 predicted that by 2025, over 30 per cent of new drug discoveries will use generative AI, as will over 30 per cent of marketing messages. It also predicted that real data, one of the key issues in AI model training, will be replaced by synthetic data in 70 per cent of cases. Co-pilot, a virtual assistant, will become ubiquitous with over 100 million users, while over 15 per cent of new applications will be generated by AI. In effect, Gartner is calling for generative AI to become a general-purpose intelligence. This will be revolutionary were it to occur.