3 AI Projects To Watch In 2021
Superintelligence, brain-AI interfaces, and self-driving cars.
Artificial Intelligence has slowly been turning SciFi into reality since the 1950s, but has really taken off in the past few years, thanks to a few major AI efforts.
At Obviously.AI, we’re focused on the day-to-day AI that makes a difference for normal companies — things like KPI optimization and automation. That said, it’s always intriguing to look ahead and see what might be possible in the future.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at three AI projects to watch in 2021.
1. OpenAI
If anyone had a good year, it’s OpenAI. In June, they started rolling out the beta of GPT-3, a lifelike text generator that was met with viral acclaim.
Now, around 15,000 researchers have beta access, and millions of people have witnessed the power of Artificial Intelligence. GPT-3 came just a year after GPT-2, which came just a year after the first iteration of GPT.
Given the shockingly-good performance of GPT-3, it’s hard to imagine what might be released in 2021. No matter what happens, you’ll want to pay attention, as OpenAI may very well be the first to reach artificial general intelligence.
Indeed, if GPT-4 is around a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than its predecessor (as GPT-3 was compared to GPT-2), then we’ll soon see AI models reaching the size of the human brain.
2. Neuralink
Strictly speaking, Neuralink isn’t an AI company. They’re in the business of developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces, which use AI for neural decoding.
This is done with a technique called “neural spike analysis,” in which a neural network is trained to detect and categorize neural channels, and then deployed on the brain-machine interface to do live inference.
In an August 2020 progress update, Neuralink revealed a new update to its brain-machine interface, which was seamlessly installed in under an hour into a number of pigs, and the brain activity of those pigs was successfully decoded, live.
This progress update also came just a year after the first launch event, and if this rate of progress continues, we’re in for some incredible news in 2021.
3. Tesla
Tesla recently started rolling out a limited beta of its Full Self-Driving feature, which will be released as a pay-as-you-go subscription service in early 2021.
As usual, Elon Musk proved the doubters wrong — who claimed it’d be another decade before self-driving cars.
Autopilot was first discussed in 2013, and we’re finally seeing it come to fruition.
In short, we expect 2021 to be an incredibly exciting year for AI, with numerous breakthroughs that’ll catapult the field ahead.
