CNN Business –
Let's be honest: the past decade has been a pretty cool time for tech events heart broken
Well-dressed executives walk around the stage posing with the camera and processor tweaks that make this year's phones so different from last year's, or adding touchscreens to other flagship products.
But that changed dramatically this week. Some of the world's biggest companies have made major improvements to their services, some of which are important to our daily lives and the way we do things. internet experience. In each case, the changes are driven by new artificial intelligence technologies that enable more sophisticated and communicative responses.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced an updated Bing search engine with the capabilities of ChatGPT, a viral artificial intelligence tool created by OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft recently invested $1 million. In addition to providing a list of search results, Bing will answer questions, interact with users, and create content in response to user requests. And there are already rumors of another event next month where Microsoft will showcase a similar feature in its Office products, including Word, PowerPoint and Outlook.
Google held an event Wednesday to explain how it plans to use technologies like artificial intelligence to give its search engine more sophisticated and conversational answers to questions. Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Baidu also said this week They will be launched Your service is in the style of ChatGPT. Other companies soon followed.
After years of incremental smartphone upgrades, the promise of 5G and social media remains unfulfilled Mimicking each other until they're all the same, this week's AI-related announcements feel like a breath of fresh air.
Yes, there are very serious concerns about this technology's ability to spread bias and misinformation, as was the case with Google's demonstration this week. Undoubtedly, many companies will introduce AI-powered chatbots You don't need it. But These features are fun, will potentially save you hours of time, and perhaps most importantly, some of them are here to try out.
Do you need to write a property listing or an annual employee review? Type a few keywords into ChatGPT's query string and your first draft will be done in three seconds. Want to create quick meal plans and shopping lists based on your food sensitivities? Looks like Bing has you covered.
If the advent of the smartphone defined the 2000s, much of the 2000s was defined by ambitious technologies that didn't quite reach Silicon Valley: cars being tested on the road but not quite ready for everyday use; virtual reality products that are better and cheaper, but have not yet found mass adoption; And 5G's promise to spur cutting-edge experimentation hasn't been fully realized, at least not yet.
But technological change, like Ernest Hemingway's brainchild of failure, has a way of progressing gradually and then suddenly. For example, the iPhone was in development years before Steve Jobs wowed people on stage in 2007. Similarly, OpenAi, the company behind ChatGPT, was founded seven years ago and has an earlier version of its AI platform called GPT3 on another . in 2020
"ChatGPT has exploded in the market and in people's minds," says Gartner analyst Bern Elliott. – But that was a long time ago.
Additionally, over the years AI systems have provided many features that people now take for granted, from content recommendations on social media platforms and email autocomplete tools to voice assistants and facial recognition tools. But when ChatGPT went public in November, it revealed the full power of the AI system to millions of people in an engaging and instantly understandable way. ChatGPT has made it very easy to see how far technology has come in recent years and imagine the huge impact it can have on the industry.
"When the next generation of technologies come out, they're often not very visible because they're not old enough to do anything about," Elliott said. "As you mature, you start to see it occasionally in an industrial setting or behind the scenes, but when it's available in person, like with ChatGPT, then the public interest grows."
Now that ChatGPT is gaining momentum and big companies are pushing to implement similar features, there are concerns not only about its accuracy, but also about the impact it will have on real people.
Some fear it could disrupt the industry and put artists, teachers, programmers, writers and journalists out of work. Others are more optimistic and may allow workers to process to-do lists more efficiently or focus on higher-level tasks. Either way, it may force the industry to evolve and change, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
"New technology always brings new risks that we need to address as a society, such as establishing acceptable use policies and educating the general public about its proper use. Guidelines will be needed," Elliott said.
Many of the experts I spoke to in recent weeks compared the shift in artificial intelligence to the early days of calculators and how educators and scientists worried it could interfere with basic math knowledge. There is a general fear of spelling and grammar tools.
Although artificial intelligence tools are still in their infancy, this week could mark the beginning of a new way of working, much like the iPhone revolutionized computing and communications in June 2007. But this time it might be in the form of Bing. browsers
