Mint AI Summit: Making sense of AI and GenAI

The hundreds of millions of dollars poured into artificial intelligence over the decades have started paying massive dividends, with adoption of AI more than doubling over the past 5 years. But now, AI itself is being transformed by generative AI.

Over the past year, companies and researchers have made tremendous advancements in this emerging technology. But that has also surfaced tensions about potential dangers emerging from uncontrolled developments in GenAI–something that played out at Sam Altman’s recent ouster and reinstatement at OpenAI.

At the Mint AI Summit to be held on Friday in New Delhi, a host of experts will discuss how to make the best use of AI and GenAI models, and address the challenges and disruptions that the exponential growth of these new technologies poses.

The speakers include Neeraj Mittal, secretary in the Department of Telecommunications; Amitabh Nag, CEO, Digital India Bhashini Division; Jack Hidary, CEO, SandboxAQ; Carin-Isabel Knoop, executive director, Harvard Business School; CEOs, startup founders, and chief information officers at Mahindra Group, Aditya Birla Group, and Maruti Suzuki. 

Drawing from their real-world experiences, these experts will discuss how they use deep-tech and other emerging technologies to harness growth and promote ‘Make in India’ goods and services.

Artificial intelligence got a massive boost when ChatGPT, within two months of its release on 30 November 2022, garnered more than 100 million users. It was great news for all those who had invested in AI for decades.

The reason: Machine learning, an AI technique, was largely limited to observing and classifying patterns in content using predictive models. 

The more advanced version of multimodal machine learning models relies on self-supervised learning, which involves feeding a model humongous amounts of text, images, videos, and code to enable it to generate content.

Clubbed under the broad umbrella of generative AI, it describes algorithms and large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT that, being multimodal, can not only be used to create or generate text but also audio, code, images, simulations, and videos, among other things.

ChatGPT remains the most dominant AI-powered chatbot globally, particularly in India, even as the dust settles on the corporate turmoil at OpenAI. But the battle’s far from over for CEO Sam Altman and his team, with competition heating up not just from other tech companies, big and small, but also from rival technologies like the just-released Google Gemini, which is a credible rival to OpenAI’s GPT-4.

In India, as in the US and Brazil, the chatbot is mostly used on mobile devices, per new reports by data.ai (formerly App Annie) and writerbuddy.ai. Of the top 50 AI platforms that writebuddy.ai analysed, including Google Bard, ChatGPT cornered a 60% share of the traffic.

ChatGPT is the most-popular AI tool in the US, followed by India and Brazil, according to the writerbuddy.ai study. But as per analytics platform data.ai, India accounted for the most ChatGPT app installations globally (18%), just ahead of the US (17.5%). 

Data.ai in its 1 December report added that ChatGPT’s mobile version had achieved 110 million downloads and generated about $28.6 million in global consumer spending.

Evidently, individuals and companies across the world are embracing AI-powered tools to write blogs, reviews, resumes, and product descriptions, make short films and videos, create images, generate software code, provide templates for marketing campaigns, and even analyse broad economic trends. 

These large GenAI models need a fair bit of customisation and fine-tuning. But that’s not the big challenge in employing GenAI tools. The big threat remains security and privacy–challenges that both industry and researchers need to tackle head-on even as they scramble to stay up-to-date and adapt to the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence.