The boom of “chatbots” (chat robots) has embarked the big technology companies in a new competitive race, with the US and China at the head, in a market such as artificial intelligence (AI) that has become popular with the irruption of ChatGPT and in which millions of users are played.
The US and China lead venture capital investments in AI in OECD countries, to the point that of the just over 120,000 million dollars (112,186 million euros) that were allocated in 2022, 55,000 million came from the United States and 20,000 from the Asian country.
In third place was the EU, with 12,000 million dollars, according to data from the OECD AI observatory, to which EFE has had access.
In a 2023 in which layoffs in large technology companies already exceed 100,000 employees, these companies have immersed themselves fully in the ChatGPT, in a resounding race in which this week the Chinese Alibaba and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), as well as the American Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).
MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF USERS ALREADY USE IT
ChatGPT uses a type of algorithm (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) that, trained on 300,000 million words and 570 GB (Gigabytes) of data records, allows generating responses in a chat, returning searches for information out loud, and endless applications of very high impact, Alberto Palomo, the head of the data office (Chief Data Officer) for Spain, has informed EFE.
“The raw material of these algorithms or chat robots is in the data and is a clear application of how to get value from them,” he added.
Millions and millions of users have already signed up for ChatGPT, a conversational chat that broke out at the end of November and that uses a highly advanced natural language to the point of leading us to start rethinking the work model of the future.
This potential can impact services such as customer service or data management, Daniel Palacios, an innovation consultant at Softtek, a Mexican company dedicated to software development, told EFE.
OpenAI is the technology responsible for ChatGPT, a company in which Microsoft invested 1,000 million euros in July, to which it wants to add another 10,000 million recently announced. This week this company has reported that its Bing search engine will have a version that uses the AI of ChatGPT.
Google, for its part, has launched something similar, Bard; Baidu (the Chinese Google) plans to do the same in March with ‘Ernie Bot’, while the main rival of the latter in the search engine sector, the company 360, will release an application of this type “as soon as possible”.
None of the big tech companies (Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Meta (NASDAQ:GOAL)) have specified to EFE their investment in artificial intelligence after being asked about this matter.
According to IDC data, investment in AI in 2022 amounted to 127,472 million euros, 27.9% more than last year, and an average annual growth of 26% is expected in the next three years.
In Spain, growth has been even greater, with investment increasing by 2023.30% in 7, to 1,006 million euros, with forecasts of an increase of 32.2% over the next three years.
IN 2023, NEW TRENDS
In 2023 the trends in AI point to an even more important development, to the point that a new version of GPT, GPT-4, is expected, which would be up to 500 times more powerful and in which the focus will be on the generation of natural language models added to the generation of video and humans, report sources from Wehumans, a Spanish company specializing in the development of digital humans trained with AI.
AI is not new, its term was coined more than 60 years ago, but it is currently living a “second youth,” the president of the College of Computer Engineers, Fernando Suárez, told EFE.
Until now, smart speakers and mobile devices were used, but the novelty currently, with the ‘chatbots’, is that “they have been democratized,” he said.