The Rise of AI Assistants in 2023, Interactive AI to Emerge in 2024
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In 2023, AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Llama have emerged, promising to make the world more efficient but also potentially leading to millions of job losses. These AI assistants have helped users worldwide generate content that would typically require many more hours of human effort. Nevertheless, large-scale layoffs have not yet occurred.
Over the past year, dozens of specialized alternatives have emerged for application coding, video and graphic content creation, or music composition.
Limitations of Chatbots
Despite the powerful capabilities of these so-called large language model-based chatbots, critics point out that they often plagiarize content from the internet when generating responses, frequently producing bland content, containing factual errors, or displaying political or racial biases.
Tesla founder Elon Musk launched the beta version of his AI assistant Grok last month, attempting to address this issue. Grok is hailed as a chatbot with a 'sense of humor' and 'rebellious traits,' though it has also been accused of political bias.
Intensified competition in the AI industry
With hundreds of billions of dollars invested globally, competition in the AI field is becoming increasingly fierce, and tech industry leaders are predicting the next direction of technological development.
Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman believes that the future of AI assistants lies in their advanced interaction capabilities with humans. In a September interview with MIT Technology Review, Suleyman stated: "The third wave will be the interactive phase. That's why I've long believed conversation is the user interface of the future."
The Development of Interactive AI
Interactive AI will allow humans to engage in deeper conversations with AI chatbots. Compared to systems like Amazon's Alexa, the next generation of AI tools will be able to respond in a more human-like manner.
Suleyman stated that these tools will also be capable of making decisions on their own, so users can give the assistant an overall, high-level goal, and it will utilize all tools to achieve this objective.
Advantages of Interactive AI
Industry experts believe that interactive AI will produce more innovative and original content. It will be capable of undertaking more complex and time-consuming tasks, which involve interactions with other humans, websites, and chatbots, while regularly reporting progress or results to users.
By being able to process more advanced feedback from users, interactive AI can also prevent the generation of harmful or offensive content or ensure the precise delivery of complex projects.
Interactive AI Launch Time
Some companies are already pushing forward the development of interactive AI. Suleyman's own chatbot Pi AI is a precursor to interactive AI. Another early version of interactive AI is Character.ai, which allows users to interact with multiple 'characters' of AI assistants created by other users.
The Rapid Spread of AI Technology
Microsoft founder Bill Gates believes that as more people use AI technology, AI is about to "significantly accelerate the innovation pipeline." In his year-end blog post, he predicts that high-income countries like the United States will see widespread AI adoption within 18 to 24 months.
However, these predictions about AI have also sparked concerns that this technology may soon replace millions of white-collar jobs, most of which have been preserved during the computer revolution of the past 30 years.
Although the impact on employment has been limited so far, some technology experts believe it's only a matter of time before jobs in creative, financial, legal, and medical fields are replaced by AI.
On the other hand, some technology analysts have also expressed concerns about AI-generated deepfake videos and other misinformation in 2024, especially ahead of the US presidential election in November.