[Murli]

You could try out an alternative to ChatGPT - "Perplexity".

It gives links to its sources which I found very useful.

https://www.perplexity.ai/

ChatGPT Plus vs. Perplexity: Which Is the Better AI Chatbot? (also BING)

https://www.makeuseof.com/chatgpt-pl...which-is-best/

[car_is_matic]

Humanity is indeed a universe's gift, sadly the purpose of it is lost in chasing materialistic things and constant satisfaction of the ego.

[SmartCat]

Google's AI chatbot is now live:
https://bard.google.com/

[rrsteer]

To the experts who know, has Google really fallen behind in the AI race? If yes, why did it happen?, because before ChatGPT happened, I had read Google was the dominant force in Large Language Models.

[rrsteer]

Three high school students from different countries identified new therapeutic targets for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) using artificial intelligence.

The AI screened datasets from the National Center for Biotechnology Information and found new therapeutic targets implicated in treating both aging and GBM.

The teens used AI to analyze the genes and identified three that were strongly correlated with both aging and glioblastoma and could serve as potential therapeutic targets for new drugs.

https://neurosciencenews.com/ai-brai...ng%20and%20GBM.

These high school kids used a Generative AI based platform for their research.

[rrsteer]

I was teaching my daughter and we got stuck in a place where we had to change a particular sentence to its feminine form. It all came down to knowing the feminine form of one word. We also thought the spellings were incorrect. I had one answer and my daughter another, and we were confused. Gen AI came to rescue.



My written Punjabi is poor and I am finding Bard a very handy tool for myself to teach the subject to my daughter, while she is still very new at it.

[Samurai]

What just happened?

I don't mean today, this week or this month. I mean what happened to AI industry in the last few months. There are thousands of articles on what jobs will be lost due to ChatGPT, but I couldn't find articles on the impact on traditional AI companies. How many will survive?

Let's take Conversational AI, which is one area where plenty of AI companies had invested deeply. In fact, India was in the forefront of this area because of the need for supporting so many Indian languages for various business applications related to customer interaction.

All my views in this post are restricted to conversational AI and not other kind of AI.

Originally Posted by https://www.ibm.com/topics/conversational-ai

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) refers to technologies, like chatbots or virtual agents, which users can talk to. They use large volumes of data, machine learning, and natural language processing to help imitate human interactions, recognizing speech and text inputs and translating their meanings across various languages.

These are transactional bots, with specific knowledge of the customer data, in order to interact with the customer within a very specific context. In simple words, a transactional bot will glean the intent of the customer input (text or voice) and then reply with an appropriate response based on customer data. If you ask about weather or mutual fund products with a customer service bot, it wouldn't have a clue. Plenty of funded AI companies were working on building better and improved AI models to deal with more and more complex business interactions.

There are generally two kinds of business model followed by these AI companies. The first kind focus purely on developing technology using VC funding, and revenue generation is not a priority for them. They want to sell the technology or company to the highest bidder and then exit with their rewards. The second kind do focus a lot on revenue generation and use their in-house technology as a differentiator to provide more value to the customers. You could call them AI SaaS companies.

About 6 months ago, ChatGPT happens. A LLM AI engine that blows every in-house AI technology out of the water. It can instantly learn from any structured or unstructured data and generate very impressive (even if flawed) results. When it is exposed to customer data, it can conduct 10 to 100 times better interaction with the customer. The first kind of AI companies suddenly found themselves paddling a boat in a dry creek. Their base technology is nearly worthless, unless they can find some other kind of non-conversational usage.

The upcoming ChatGPT Business or a private instance of ChatGPT can wipe out AI SaaS companies too unless they quickly replace their in-house engine with ChatGPT APIs. This turns them from a product company to a pure services company. Their bottom-line will suffer, and they have to focus a lot on customer acquisition and develop very domain specific knowledge base.

BTW, a ChatGPT based transaction bot can actually discuss weather or answer unrelated queries during any business transaction. It will be an insanely knowledgeable agent or bot, on all matters.

So, what next?

Data analysts and data engineers will be still required to find and feed relevant data to ChatGPT. But what is the role of data scientists in the presence of ChatGPT?

And the biggest threat will be from traditional services companies like TCS/Infosys/Wipro/HCL and their ilk. With ChatGPT APIs, these service companies can easily out compete smaller AI companies, whose main USP just got neutralized. The large service companies have the connections and brand value to corner most of the business in conversation AI space thanks to ChatGPT.

In my long career, I have never seen a bleeding edge hi-tech industry get upended in this manner so quickly. I am still wondering if my analysis is even correct. Am I missing something here?

Can home grown AI industry push back against ChatGPT? Sam Altman recently commented on it, the answer is NO.

Visiting India, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tells Indians: You can try to build AI like ChatGPT, but you will fail

And I agree with him. It is not a matter of skill or grit. It is a matter of funding and long gestation period. A ChatGPT beating technology will need few billion dollars of investment, and few years of waiting. Who will fund that in India? The risk of failure is simply too high.

[SmartCat]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Can home grown AI industry push back against ChatGPT? Sam Altman recently commented on it, the answer is NO.

Visiting India, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tells Indians: You can try to build AI like ChatGPT, but you will fail

And I agree with him. It is not a matter of skill or grit. It is a matter of funding and long gestation period. A ChatGPT beating technology will need few billion dollars of investment, and few years of waiting. Who will fund that in India? The risk of failure is simply too high.

I was surprised by the indignation at his comments.

Even if an Indian established company or startup is willing to invest billions of dollars and hire the best people, ChatGPT/Google Bard etc have a 5+ years headstart. By the time desi ChatGPT gets to this level of usability, these established companies would have gone to a different level altogether.

If we didn't have a desi Google equivalent in 2005/2010/2015/2020, we can't have a ChatGPT either.

However, China is a different case. They will build things from scratch (eg: search engine, twitter like social networking etc) but ensure that it has 300 to 500 million users. That is achieved by blocking the competition (eg: Google, twitter etc). So companies building products in China for China are assured of success if the end-product is good enough.

[adithya.kp]

Nice post. I agree, a lot of things are getting disrupted. Also, the AI/ML models themselves are getting commoditised. This morning I came across this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36412713 . Of late I too have been thinking on similar lines.
So, in such an environment, what would your advice be (For both individual contributors and entrepreneurs in this field) ? Would love to hear your views.

Originally Posted by Samurai

In my long career, I have never seen a bleeding edge hi-tech industry get upended in this manner so quickly. I am still wondering if my analysis is even correct. Am I missing something here?

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by adithya.kp

This morning I came across this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36412713 . Of late I too have been thinking on similar lines.
So, in such an environment, what would your advice be (For both individual contributors and entrepreneurs in this field) ? Would love to hear your views.

I had already answered this last month. Also check this and the next post.

[adithya.kp]

Thanks. deterministic vs probabilistic based explanation makes a lot of sense.
I think a lot of people are overlooking this. A majority of the use-cases/problems statements fall under deterministic category.

Originally Posted by Samurai

I had already answered this last month. Also check this and the next post.

[tsk1979]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Can home grown AI industry push back against ChatGPT? Sam Altman recently commented on it, the answer is NO..

I would go with Google take

"We have no moat, nor do they"

[warrioraks]

Originally Posted by Samurai

What just happened?

I don't mean today, this week or this month. I mean what happened to AI industry in the last few months. There are thousands of articles on what jobs will be lost due to ChatGPT, but I couldn't find articles on the impact on traditional AI companies. How many will survive?

This is true. GPT and similar models are disrupting most (if not all) products which deal with unstructured data. It has lowered the entry barrier by levelling the field and destroying the competitive advantage of these AI product companies. A lot of their intellectual property and patents are now worth the paper it is printed on.

Added later: A lot of these so called product AI companies use open source models OR native cloud AI capabilities under the hood with no real IP.
These companies are no better than TCS, Infosys but still command a premium because of their product positioning. They will run into difficult conversations with their clients. Due to popularity of ChatGPT, clients might gain the confidence to build their own products/solutions using IT vendors. This will result in product companies with lesser pricing power and directly competing with IT firms which is a hard sell.

[NewUser123]

The GP in Chat GPT stands for General Purpose.

I feel the next level of AI development, for product firms, as discussed above, would be purpose built or specialised AI for time consuming human applications.

For eg. China’s AI warship designer nearly did a years work within a day/

[warrioraks]

Originally Posted by NewUser123

The GP in Chat GPT stands for General Purpose.

I feel the next level of AI development, for product firms, as discussed above, would be purpose built or specialised AI for time consuming human applications.
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That’s not what it stands for.

GPT refers to generative pre-trained transformer. It refers to a specific class of transformer models.

Also purpose built AI applications have been around for many-many years. A bank’s loan processing application or Swiggy’s chatbot is a purpose built application.
These pre-date any of the OpenAI stuff that has just been available for a few months now.