Artificial Intelligence: 2024 and Beyond

Brew it slowly, with a good measure of safety and ethics, to ward off bitterness and bring out the best flavour, say experts and world leaders.

It is that time of the year again, when everyone is summarising the year gone by, and speculating about the year ahead. Things are no different in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). Since the advent of ChatGPT, there is probably no topic being discoursed and debated more than AI. So much, that Collins Dictionary has declared AI to be the word of the year 2023. The dictionary defines AI as, "the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs." That is how it has always been defined. But, at one point of time that seemed far-fetched. Now, it is real, and causing a lot of excitement and anxiety.

The word of the year usually highlights the raging trend of those times. For example, in 2020 it was lockdown, and the next year it was non-fungible tokens (NFTs). These terms no longer dominate our thoughts, prompting us to wonder whether the excitement around AI will also fizzle out like past trends, or will it emerge brighter in the coming years? This reminds us of a recent remark by Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, the entity that invested $50 million in OpenAI in early 2019. He remarked that the flurry of investments in AI post-ChatGPT may not meet with similar success. “Most investments in AI today, venture investments, will lose money,” he said in a media interview, comparing this year’s AI hype with last year’s cryptocurrency investment activity.

The gathering at Bletchley Park, UK