The future of generative AI is niche, not generalized

Provided byThoughtworks

The relentless hype surrounding generative AI in the past few months has been accompanied by equally loud anguish over the supposed perils — just look at the open letter calling for a pause in AI experiments. This tumult risks blinding us to more immediate risks — think sustainability and bias — and clouds our ability to appreciate the real value of these systems: not as generalist chatbots, but instead as a class of tools that can be applied to niche domains and offer novel ways of finding and exploring highly specific information.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The news that a dozen companies have developed ChatGPT plugins is a clear demonstration of the likely direction of travel. A “generalized” chatbot won’t do everything for you, but if you’re, say, Expedia, being able to offer customers a simple way to organize their travel plans is undeniably going to give you an edge in a marketplace where information discovery is so important.

Whether or not this really amounts to an “iPhone moment” or a serious threat to Google search isn’t obvious at present — while it will likely push a change in user behaviors and expectations, the first shift will be organizations pushing to bring tools trained on large language models (LLMs) to learn from their own data and services.

And this, ultimately, is the key — the significance and value of generative AI today is not really a question of societal or industry-wide transformation. It’s instead a question of how this technology can open up new ways of interacting with large and unwieldy amounts of data and information.

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OpenAI is clearly attuned to this fact and senses a commercial opportunity: although the list of organizations taking part in the ChatGPT plugin initiative is small, OpenAI has opened up a waiting list where companies can sign up to gain access to the plugins. In the months to come, we will no doubt see many new products and interfaces backed by OpenAI’s generative AI systems.

While it’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing OpenAI as the sole gatekeeper of this technology — and ChatGPT as the go-to generative AI tool — this fortunately is far from the case. You don’t need to sign up on a waiting list or have vast amounts of cash available to hand over to Sam Altman; instead, it’s possible to self-host LLMs.

This is something we’re starting to see…

Read The Full Article at MIT Technology Review