Accelerating AI
Open AI is a path breaking and futuristic step to accelerate the outcomes from Artificial Intelligence. In an interesting interview , Elon Musk and Sam Altman share their vision of Open AI.
I think there have been multiple drivers to this announcement:
- AI has been a tough problem to solve till date and combining forces across organizations and technology luminaries will help advance the cause
- It is not possible for public companies to go beyond their missions and invest in the the research broadly because of short term expectations of financial returns on such investments
- A non-profit of this nature can have undefined missions, long gestation periods and larger than life transformation objectives
- Democratize access to expensive Artificial Intelligence research and rely on community to contribute towards the advancement
- Finally, fear of a few organizations or group of people getting supremacy on AI could result in negative outcomes for the entire world
I think we are at the cusp of the AI revolution with many unsolved problems waiting to be solved. So far, it has been restricted to natural language processing, translations, pattern recognition etc.
So, what are the implications of this announcement?
- Race for already scarce AI talent will further intensify as Open AI, other companies and research institutions try to ramp up their AI efforts
- With companies such as Infosys also supporting the cause is a good news for commercial clients, as service providers would be driven to bring innovations from AI world to solve real world problems in years to come
- Technology will advance at an exponential rate (case in example is Android - we didn't have Android 10 years ago and now it dominates the Mobile computing) and not in a very distant future, we will see non-tech companies getting excited to plan for pilots on machine learning and AI to solve their customer problems
