Key strategies to overcome obstacles and unleash AI success.
"Not too long ago, the term “generative artificial intelligence” was known only to data scientists and machine learning specialists. Now it’s a topic of cocktail party conversations, comedy monologues and congressional hearings.
This transformative technology became an overnight sensation in December 2022, when OpenAI made available to the public a preview of its text chatbot ChatGPT-3, along with its image-generating cousin DALL-E. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could tap into a seemingly sentient AI chatbot to conduct research, compose emails, draft reports, write poetry, solve math problems, generate code or produce original images — all by using conversational text prompts. ChatGPT captured the public imagination in a way few other emerging technologies have. Within two months, more than 100 million people had signed on to experiment with the tool — making it one of the most rapid adoptions of a digital service in history. By March 2023, competitors like Microsoft, Google and Anthropic had 3 released their own gen AI chatbots to the public, with occasionally embarrassing results.
At the same time, we saw a boom in open-source, large language model (LLM) alternatives such as Meta’s Llama 2 and Falcon LLM, with performance comparable to commercial, externally hosted models. These strides of innovation started a race toward greater and greater generative AI (gen AI) advancements, which show no signs of slowing. Companies spanning Amazon to Samsung to X (née Twitter) have all announced plans to unveil their own gen AI products — and a plethora more are on the horizon. It is a frenetic new frontier. But enterprises are still grappling with how to tap into the enormous potential of this technology while avoiding the worst possible pitfalls.
To fully understand how gen AI can help improve productivity and drive business decisions — while skirting the biggest potholes of possible reputational danger — it helps to understand how the technology works and how we got here."
