Daniel Jiang, General Manager of Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence explains in detail how can the evolution of AI be advantageous to our daily lives

There’s no doubt that 2023 will be the year that advances in AI will reshape manufacturing, retail, finance, marketing, media and many other well established industries. However, innovation driven by the advances in technology and specific applications to a wide range of industries, has become an irreversible trend, most often with favourable outcomes. It’s my belief that we should be open-minded about generative AI too, because what’s coming in the months and years ahead, could potentially bring progress to society as a whole. This is gaining traction in most parts of the world including the UAE and Middle East, Europe and Americas.

Generative AI becomes creative…
What is fascinating about generative AI, is that instead of analysing existing data, it creates new and original content from machine learning algorithms trained on previous work. Developers have already used it to generate images or text, to program code, paint and illustrate and even create video and sound. Of course, it‘s not yet perfect, and it often delivers mixed results. Over the next few years though, generative AI will develop human-like content creation capabilities to facilitate digital content creationThat means, potentially, an entire infrastructure and ecosystem based on generative AI will emerge to facilitate access to models and services for people without technological expertise. This also gives everyone the capacity to ramp up their efficiency and productivity with the technology supplementing their existing skills and knowledge.

… and it has a sixth sense, too
Just as humans have developed multiple senses to explore, enjoy and survive the world, AI has become capable of learning from different sources to in order to evolve, too. Multi-modal pre-trained models combine different types of data, including images, text, speech and digital data, to understand the world. In doing so, they enter the field of AI. Unlike their single-modular predecessors, these AI models will devour many different types of data and process them simultaneously to bring new found speed and accuracy to many applications. This could have positive implications delivers for organisations when it comes to processing and understanding data, information sharing, enhancing internal operations, and even simplifying and optimising the customer experience.

Today’s AI is A1 for boosting productivity
Multi-modal pre-trained models outperform single-modal models in terms of understanding, extracting, generating and answering questions. By giving companies access to advanced models and data analytics, multi-modal pre-trained models could help boost business productivity, agility and efficiency in today’s digital economy and in the future.

AI aids better understanding the cloud
Today, more and more companies are migrating to the cloud. However, the cloud is becoming a patchwork of integrated services that are now increasingly difficult to disentangle. It can be difficult to navigate, and even cloud experts can only absorb and retain so much information at a time. Because recruiting competent IT staff has become more challenging, there’s a shortage of cloud talent, so you can understand why a growing number of cloud service providers are using AI technology to reduce complexity and to manage cloud deployments more effectively.

AI is gaining momentum
To make AI processing more efficient, there is a new computer architecture called ‘processing-in-memory.’ Traditional computer system architecture uses separate processors and memory units to perform data processing tasks. This requires a constant back-and-forth of data between the processor and the main memory. In-memory processing overcomes the data transfer by taking the processing directly to where the data is stored, resulting in reduced power consumption and increased system performance. Developers have been building in-memory computing chips to power a wide range of AI applications, from virtual and augmented reality to astronomical data computing.

Generative AI will ‘find’ its place to coexist among other established technologies. I am confident that, as it matures, it will complement the skills of the human workforce to help us all become more efficient and creative in our output whether in the workplace or at home.