From Google Assistant to Amazon Echo to Facebook chatbots, we live with AI technologies every day. Yet it can feel like artificial intelligence has only recently emerged from the shadows. The truth is, that’s largely because of the way the technology is developed and deployed today. A combination of supercomputers, massive data, and new algorithms has led to major AI breakthroughs in recent years.
But this new kind of AI isn’t a fad. It’s a real revolution – and it’s bringing about big changes in the business world. From reducing customer effort to automating tedious work and boosting sales, it’s changing how companies operate.
It’s also raising ethical issues. For example, thousands of artists, musicians and writers – including Abba singer Bjorn Ulvaeus and writers Ian Rankin and Joanne Harris – signed a statement in October 2024 complaining that they are being used as “training data” for AI systems without consent or compensation.
One of the most significant developments has been in language processing. In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum developed ELIZA, the first machine to interact with patients in a Rogerian-style therapy session, using textual input.
Now, the latest generation of generative AI and large language model (LLM) tools can do some amazing things with text. These include variational autoencoders – introduced in 2013 – that generate multiple variations of content (words in sentences, shapes in images, frames of video or commands in software code) to respond to a prompt; and diffusion models, which add noise to a sequence until it becomes unrecognizable before generating original content.