“You will see a lot from us in the next few months”

It’s been a tough year for the tech world, and the Silicon Valley giants are cutting costs and regrouping. But one area where companies are reluctant to cut spending next year, judging by the current reporting season, is artificial intelligence.

Until recently, the tech giants seemed to be playing it safe with AI. Facebook, for example, has experimented with AI and chatbots for years, but the sheer size and bureaucracy of the sector’s largest companies have also been criticized for holding back a rapid innovation leap. in deep science fields such as artificial intelligence.

That all changed in November when San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, which has about 500 employees, launched ChatGPT, an advanced chatbot and big language model that had all the tech giants on their toes.

In a few short months, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has quickly become one of the most widely used applications in the world. The chatbot surpassed 100 million monthly active users in January and is currently the fastest growing consumer app in history, according to research released Wednesday by Swiss investment bank UBS. Despite its informational shortcomings, ChatGPT’s popularity is unlikely to wane anytime soon given how it continues to wow audiences around the world.

The tech giants are sure to take notice, especially after competitor Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment that effectively makes it responsible for launching artificial intelligence over the next few years. And they confirmed this during calls to investors this week. While some of them are still reeling from falling sales and thousands of layoffs, many tech leaders are signaling that AI will play a much larger role in the future.

Unleashing the “incredible opportunities AI brings to consumers, our partners and our business” is one of Google’s parent Alphabet’s biggest priorities in 2023, CEO Sundar Pichai said in his opening remarks during an Alphabet call with investors in Thursday.

“AI is the deepest technology we are working on today,” he added.

Big Tech Embedded in AI

Google is keen to remain competitive with OpenAI and Microsoft as ChatGPT poses a direct threat and has reportedly caused a “code red” for the former company’s longtime search engine hegemony.

Pichai said during the call that Alphabet will soon be incorporating its own AI, known as LaMDA, into its search engine.

“Very soon, people will be able to interact directly with our latest and most powerful language model as a complement to Search in experimental and innovative ways. Stay with us,” he said.

“We have been preparing for this moment since the beginning of last year, and you will see a lot from us in the next few months,” he added of the company’s planned release of various AI products, including PaLM, another major language model.

But Google isn’t the only major tech company looking to expand AI’s presence to counter the rise of OpenAI. During a call to Apple on Thursday, CEO Tim Cook said artificial intelligence is “a mainstream” at the company, adding that its applications can “affect every product and every service we have.”

Facebook parent company Meta has also been spending more on its AI programs in recent months to bolster its metaverse ambitions and has redesigned its data center design plans to support AI workloads.

Company executives highlighted these points during Meta’s earnings call on Wednesday: “The two main technology waves driving our roadmap are AI today and the Metaverse longer term,” said CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg. CFO Susan Lee added that in the long term, the company is “significantly investing in artificial intelligence” to improve its privacy features.

Meta is also signaling that there will be more focus on AI in the coming months as the company looks to optimize the performance of Reels, its Facebook and Instagram short video feature that has so far failed to replicate the success of similar offerings from competing apps. like TikTok.

launch threat

But the big tech companies opposed to OpenAI, and the many other startups working on artificial intelligence and its growing list of applications, may face an inherent downside: Big tech can be too big.

According to Clayton Christensen, the late Harvard economist and business consultant who literally wrote a book on disruptive innovation, disruptive technological developments, such as great advances in artificial intelligence, come much easier to more agile startups than to large companies weighed down by bureaucracy. once. Christensen argued in his work that large companies tend to be less successful at innovating, given the need to maintain their established business.

“In fact, one of the bittersweet results of success is that as companies get bigger, they lose their ability to enter small emerging markets,” Christensen wrote in a 2000 Harvard Business Review article. “So the reason big companies often turn down emerging markets is because smaller, disruptive companies are actually more capable of pursuing them.”

For companies like Alphabet and Meta, the disruptive power of AI could be the same problem. From a technological standpoint, Google’s and ChatGPT’s language models have “much more similarities than differences,” UBS researchers write in a report this week. But that doesn’t mean Google can get rid of bureaucratic hurdles just as easily.

Last month, Google released an update on its AI work that reaffirmed its commitment to advancing the technology, but while the UBS report praised the company’s work, it cautioned Google against trying to go its own way.

“Reading this post, one gets the impression that the company is grappling with multiple institutional hurdles at a time when tectonic shifts may be taking place in technology,” the researchers wrote.

Companies like Alphabet and Meta may have more resources than OpenAI, but there’s a good reason why the startup was able to successfully bring its product to the public ahead of any of the industry’s heavyweights, who are now in danger of being left behind.

This story was originally published on Fortune.com.

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