As we look back at VentureBeat's top AI stories of the year, it's clear that the industry’s advances — including, notably, in generative AI — are vast and powerful, but only the beginning of what is to come.
For example, OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab behind AI tools that exploded this year, including DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT, debuted buzzed-about advancements that drew attention from the general public as well as the tech industry. DALL-E's text-to-image generation and ChatGPT's new capabilities to produce high-quality, long-form content made creatives question whether they will soon be out of a job — and who owns the content these tools are creating anyway?
Meanwhile, the next iteration of advancements may not be far off for OpenAI. This fall, Ray, the machine learning technology behind OpenAI's large-scale operations, debuted its next milestone: Ray 2.0. The update will operate as a runtime layer and is designed to simplify the building and management of large AI workloads, which will allow companies like OpenAI to make even greater strides in 2023.
Though generative AI led much of this year's trending coverage, it wasn't the only area of AI where waves were made that had a ripple effect. Intel unveiled what it claims is the first real-time deepfake detector, which works by analyzing subtle "blood flow" in videos and produces results in minutes that are 96% accurate. It's a tool that may become increasingly useful to maintain integrity as generative AI video and image capabilities become even more realistic.
And AI continued to seemingly "eat" the world as we know it, even the most mundane technology use cases as the most complex algorithms were reoriented with AI-powered improvements this year. Google released a beta version of Simple ML for its Google Sheets tool to revamp the platform's capabilities for calculations and graphing, while DeepMind unveiled its first AI to power faster matrix multiplication algorithms, which some say may be used to improve the entire computer science industry.
Along with the strides made in AI this year, several companies are heading into 2023 with fewer AI employees due to layoffs as a result of the declining economy, including Meta. As part of its 11,000 layoffs, the technology and social media giant laid off an entire machine learning infrastructure team this fall — which came as a surprise, given the company said it plans to increase its focus on AI.
While the future may be uncertain for some AI professionals in the short term, experts don't anticipate that this will significantly impact AI's progress in the long run. There have been arguments that AI has in some respects hit a wall, or slowed down to what one industry CEO referred to as a "Stone Age." Others have fired back against claims like these, including renowned computer scientist and artificial neural networks pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who told VentureBeat that the rapid progress we're seeing in AI will continue to accelerate.
Looking ahead, Andrew Ng, founder of Landing AI and DeepLearning AI, told VentureBeat that the next decade of progress in AI will revolve heavily around its generative AI capabilities and shift toward data-centric AI.
"As we collectively make progress on this over the next few years, I think it will enable many more AI applications, and I’m very excited about that,” Ng said in a previous interview.
Progress is certain to continue, but not without bumps in the road. As legislation around regulating AI continues to unfold, it will be important for organizations to hire executives — perhaps a chief AI officer — who are knowledgeable about its benefits, consequences and constantly evolving capabilities. Until then, progress, not perfection, is what to expect for 2023.
Here's more from our top 10 AI stories of 2022: