By K Raveendran
A new advance in AI technology, leading to the development of OpenAI-created ChatGPT, is threatening to become the nemesis of data entry jobs, entry-level copywriting, customer care and support centres, and even entry-level software developers. ChatGPT promises to be a great tool for marketeers as it can produce highly effective pitches on its own, just as HR professionals can entrust it with a lot of their tasks. The new technology was made open to public only this year.
The new product development follows continued growth of machine understanding of natural-language text, making a number of AI new capabilities possible for companies use. More importantly, companies are seeing great value from industrializing AI, laying the groundwork to develop more AI applications faster and easier—and pull further ahead of competitors.
ChatGPT churns out original text content based on user prompts, and could usher in the next boom in AI use, unleashing new applications and opening AI to those with little to no technical background, according to McKinsey, which notes that while only 11 percent of AI-using companies reported leveraging the AI capabilities, this could record significant growth in the days to come.
OpenAI technologies are showing signs of becoming mainstream with Microsoft extending its partnership with OpenAI after the tech giant was rumoured to be weighing an investment of $10 billion. Chief Satya Nadella has described the new technology platform as an effective tool to democratize AI, providing developers and organizations across industries access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain. Microsoft’s collateral gain is that the new technology is powered by its proprietary Azure cloud platform.
Microsoft is also said to be planning to deploy OpenAI’s models across a variety of consumer and enterprise products in its bid to challenge Google. Microsoft has already incorporated an unknown version of OpenAI’s text-generating GPT model into Word in its autocomplete feature, and has been working on integrating it further into Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Soon its most popular apps may be integrated with some language AI tools, which would guarantee widespread use of the AI products.
The new development has much implications for India, where AI adoption remains rather low despite its huge potential. According to NASSCOM, AI is expected to add $450–500 billion to India’s GDP by 2025, accounting for 10 percent of the country’s $5 trillion GDP target. Highly digitised industries such as IT, financial services, telecommunications and media, and retail have led the way in AI implementation, while sectors, such as healthcare and pharma, energy and natural resources, and manufacturing have been slow to adopt the new technology frontiers.
But Indian conditions are ideal for a new boom in this direction. India already has the world’s third-largest start-up ecosystem. In 2021 alone, over 2,250 start-ups and 42 unicorns were added. in a year. India had at least one start-up in 555 districts and most venture capital funding is now going to AI projects in the e-commerce, banking and healthcare sectors, according to government sources.
Further, India’s AI-related patent applications grew tenfold from 2012 to 2018. India was ranked 8th in the top 10 countries by AI patent families, ahead of Russia and France. China is at the top spot, followed by the United States and Japan. The majority of the patents being filed are in the electronics and healthcare industries, a report in tech website AIM pointed out.
According to the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2021, India had the worlds’ second highest growth in AI hiring from 2016 to 2020, behind Brazil and ahead of Canada, Singapore and South Africa. Analyst India magazine as well Jigsaw Academy also reported that there were almost 91,000 AI-related staff working in India, with 16,500 job openings as of July 2020. The median salary was Rs 14.7 lakh, with the highest median salary of Rs 16.7 lakh being paid in Mumbai.
The National Education Policy of 2020 has highlighted several important areas in which the application of AI is mentioned. It recommends introducing courses related to AI at all levels of education to develop the skills required to meet the current demands of industry. In this regard, the policy recommends introduction computational thinking (CT) at a foundational stage of children’s education so that India plays a leadership role in the fields of AI, machine learning and data science. (IPA Service)
