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The buzz over artificial intelligence is everywhere you look right now, with the rate of adoption understandably turning heads.
ChatGPT hit the streets in November 2022; by January, the tech set a record as the fastest-growing consumer application with 100 million users and hardly any marketing. But ChatGPT is just one of several wildly popular AI tools in use today.
AI generally refers to the discipline of building machines and programs that can perform tasks and solve problems in the same way as a human might. The history of AI is almost as old as digital computers themselves.
Businesses are clamoring—with varying rates of success—to experiment with how processes and roles can be augmented or completely automated by artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, its competitors, and function and industry-specific AI tools.
Factory automation disrupted manual and blue-collar jobs as far back as the flour mill in the 18th century. This technology exploded in the 20th century with robots on assembly lines. AI is now similarly beginning to disrupt the job market, this time for entry-level roles in white-collar industries.
It’s not that all knowledge worker jobs will be replaced by AI. In many cases, AI will serve as a co-pilot of sorts, helping workers complete tasks more quickly. However, knowing how to use AI will become a requirement. Within a few years, workers who know how to use AI will replace those who don’t.
ChatGPT’s rapid rise reflects two broader trends. For one, tech is being adopted more quickly these days. The adoption curve for other technologies, from the internet to social media, has been nearly a vertical line. The adoption of ChatGPT was even more meteoric, with businesses paying particular attention to how AI can improve processes and bring down costs. If various elements of a single job can be done by AI, it’s only a matter of time before the technology can account for entire roles.
To compare AI’s traction with that of past technologies, Verbit analyzed data from the International Monetary Fund, Our World in Data, the Pew Research Center, and YouGov, among other sources.
OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and other tech companies competed in 2023 to introduce a variety of AI and generative AI tools. The technology—which in years past might have been kept in the sphere of academics, contractors, and secret development programs—was placed in the hands of everyday consumers.
No tech company wanted to be left behind, and these models improve based on their interaction with users. Despite its fair share of hiccups and “hallucinations,” enthusiasm for AI turned the technology into one of the hottest technological developments in recent history.
The deluge of AI tools in the last two years resulted in some stunning developments, such as the capability to generate high-quality text and images. The real magic comes from how computers can now match or exceed average human abilities during testing when it comes to image and text recognition. This is propelled by advances in “deep learning” technologies, in which computer programs utilize multiple synthetic “neural networks” to analyze inputs and generate high-caliber text and images.
Other popular AI tools include image generation tools such as Dall-E and Midjourney, which can generate images from textual descriptions; translation tools such as Google Translate; and even coding assistance tools such as GitHub, CoPilot, and Codeium.
