Stronger, scarier: A guide to AI in 2024

livemint.com:

Bengaluru: Last month, The New York Times filed a suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that their generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools—ChatGPT and Bing Chat (now rebranded as Co-pilot)—were built by copying and “using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more". While GenAI has captured everyone’s imagination and will continue to mature in the years ahead, the suit underlines the need for stronger global guard rails. Apart from copyright violations, there are fears of machines acquiring human biases and GenAI vapourizing millions of white-collar jobs.

Here’s a glimpse of how individuals and enterprises are embracing these technologies as of today and what we must expect this year. By the time OpenAI’s large language model (LLM)-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, released on 30 November 2022, AI was already powering smartphones, digital wallets, search engines, online shopping recommendations, banking apps, healthcare products and services and weather forecasts, among other things. But ChatGPT heralded the rise of GenAI.

Other GenAI systems include Google’s Gemini 1.0, Meta’s LLaMA 2, Anthropic’s Claude 2, OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 and 3 and MidJourney. Unlike traditional machine learning that can analyse data patterns to make predictions, GenAI systems can instantly create new articles, images, videos, presentations and even write simple code with the help of ‘prompts’ in natural languages like English and Hindi. Large language models have more than 100 billion parameters.