Is AI Hype Real?
Why you should care about what’s happening in the field of artificial intelligence
The past year alone has seen some remarkable AI headlines. Start-ups are popping up from all corners and making some serious money from investors. Stability AI, the open-sourced company responsible for a text-to-image generator called Stable Diffusion, raised $101 million at a $1 billion value in seed funding this past October. In more recent news, we saw Microsoft give $10 billion to Open AI, popularly known for the release of ChatGPT. These numbers are astounding, but what do they say about the state of artificial intelligence?
We’ve seen other technology trends come and go. Take, for example, the cryptocurrency sector, which started 2022 with $39 million in Super Bowl advertising spots and a pretty significant $11 billion in venture capital investments. This number dropped to only $3.7 billion in quarter four of last year, and you may have been hearing less talk from your local crypto bro after the bankruptcy of FTX, which as of recent reports lost a total $9 billion in customer funds.
Artificial intelligence seems different, however. The products coming out of companies like Stability AI and Open AI are displaying very tangible results, and the technology is growing and improving at an incredibly rapid pace. We at Byte-Sized Insights buy the hype and here’s why you should too, broken down by our top stakeholders.
Academics
Students and researchers should absolutely recognize that AI hype is real. First of all, it’s incredibly interesting stuff, and you can tackle it from so many different directions. The disciplines that combine to form artificial intelligence literature range from linear algebra, statistics, and computer science all the way to neuroscience and psycholinguistics. There’s not only a lot of funding going into this kind of research, but it’s obviously valued in industry as well. Careers in AI are plentiful and lucrative, which brings me to the next section.
Industry Tech Workers
All of the biggest technology companies are looking for people who know about artificial intelligence. Among these jobs as well, you have a wide variety of titles such as Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer and Deep Learning Architect. Working in industry applications of artificial intelligence also allows you to be involved with other fields that intersect with artificial intelligence. For example, finance companies are transitioning to tools that use AI to automatically detect fraud and quickly analyze mass quantities of data, saving lots of time on work that was once done manually by humans. In the healthcare space, this technology is being used from streamlining administrative tasks to diagnosing tumors in X-ray images all the way to robot-assisted surgeries. Today, there is no shortage of opportunities to leverage AI knowledge in almost any domain you can think of.
Business Leaders
Business leaders should believe the hype for a few reasons. The applications of artificial intelligence in all of the fields that were mentioned above (and more) means that the next big startup idea could be right around the corner — and there’s clearly no lack of funding either. Some less-talked-about uses for AI, though, are in the cost and productivity benefits for automating everyday business operations. For example, chatbots as the first line of defense in customer service, machine learning-based product recommendation systems, or enhanced market research through predictive algorithms are just some of the ways businesses are accelerating thanks to the power of artificial intelligence.
Everyone Else
There’s a lot happening right now when it comes to artificial intelligence: Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is making our homes smarter and more efficient; Google Translate can help you write an email to a foreign grandparent; Tesla’s self-driving cars have the potential to make our roads safer; and ChatGPT helped me write parts of this blog post. These are just a few of the applications of AI that have the potential to change the way we experience modern life, and advancements in this space show no signs of slowing down. The hype is definitely real. Equally as important as understanding why the hype surrounding AI exists, though, is thinking about the implications of this hype. We may not yet reaching the point where a superintelligence can take over all of us — one type of hype that I’m less keen on for the moment — but now especially is the time to learn about how much (or how little) we want artificial intelligence as a presence in our lives.
