The Acceleration of Artificial Intelligence Development: The Advent of AI — Part 4

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DataFrens.sg

4 min readJun 18, 2023

It is amazing to see the explosion of AI development happening before our eyes in a matter of months since ChatGPT was launched last Nov. The impact is so rapid that it has even taken the financial world by storm. The recent rally in the stock market has been single-handedly turbocharged by tech stocks with links to AI.

I had been observing its progress with interest via a series of blogs on this topic since Feb (see below for the links to Parts 1 to 3) and today’s blog will be Part 4 of my AI tracking journey. Every month sees new uses being developed and introduced as the AI arms war heats up between the big players as well as the internet community. So much has changed and developed since ChatGPT was introduced a mere 7 months ago.

Every big tech name is getting into the game in a big way, integrating into their current systems using a freemium model to gain user traction. We are now into a free for all AI buffet and the eat-all-you-can environment will result in new innovations that will be beyond our wildest imaginations.

To get the elephant in the room question on AI out of the way first. It is NOT sentinel yet. Ironman Jarvis is many years into the future. As I explained in an earlier blog last month, we are not there yet. Based on how ChatGPT and Generative AI work now, the AI we see is only ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) which is good at “TALKing” to generate written and image output responses to human prompting. It uses a method of Tokenization to analyze the user prompt and then look into its database for high-probability results to form an end-product output. NLP (Natural Language Processing) is then utilized to provide the response. What most fear is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which is when the machine can THINK for itself. We are far from there and the Terminator is not coming any time soon.

Some say that this is a big bang moment that is as big as the introduction of the internet in the early 1990s. Unlike the dot.com era of 2000 where any crazy idea with a tech association (remember Pets.com?) was bought up and funded, the current AI frenzy is different. We constantly see new ideas every week being employed that are more amazing than the previous month using the tools of AI building blocks. Even laymen like myself can easily use the new no-code apps. The UX (User Experience) is getting simpler to try and they produce high-quality outputs via fine-tuned prompting.

To date, there have been several innovative ways to use AI that have been discovered every day. Take for example the use of generative AI to create new images from the merging of the photos of 2 or more real people. Ever wondered what the kids will look like if Harry Styles and Taylor Swift started a family? Now you can! See what you had missed with ex-girlfriends LOL…

The number of AI possibilities is endless and limitless as more creative uses are discovered. Productivity will skyrocket as turnaround times are reduced, freeing up more time for greater creative activities. Even uncles like me can pick up AI skills without any need for simple coding skills, using the free tools we can discover on the web.

To show how easy it is for a non-IT layman like me to do so, I used stable diffusion to create the following image below by typing a simple sentence: “Merge Joe Biden and Putin into one person, talking in Congress”. I can then prompt ChatGPT to do the following: “Imagine you are the presidents of the USA and Russia. Write a 300 words political speech on the following topic: To offer my sincere apologies to Ukraine and China for what we have done.”

I then use another freely available AI application to combine the face photo with the ChatGPT script to create a talking video. The finished product will be of the imaginary person reading the whole speech like a normal human video with various facial expressions. The end-to-end process can be completed within 15 minutes. https://youtu.be/ZBSQZm7WrUs

The above experiment I did was completed 2 months ago as I had described in an earlier blog. As of now, even better quality ones and short feature videos can easily be created using newer AI tools. Anything is possible and it will be getting harder to distinguish real or artificial AI-created images.

The recent US stock market rally had been mainly powered by AI tech-related companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla. I am glad to say that I have all of them in my tech-heavy equity portfolio as I am a firm believer in AI. This emerging renaissance, like the start of the World Wide Web, means that we will have a quantum leap of humankind and move to a new and highly productive evolution very soon.

My recent blogs on AI this year:

The Advent of AI, ChatGPT and Others — Exploring the Next Frontier — Part 1 (12 Feb 2023)

The Advent of AI — Part Deux (16 Apr 2023)

Can the Advent of AI be Stopped or Slowed Down? The Short Answer is “NO” (14 May 2023)