We've all seen the Hollywood movies where malicious, ruthlessly intelligent robots take over the world and subjugate humanity or threaten our very existence - The Matrix, Terminator, I, Robot, and more.
Pop culture has taught us to fear artificial intelligence - AI.
But that's just ridiculous. The reality is, AI will be civilization's greatest accomplishment... and it already everywhere in our lives, even if we don't know it.
I briefly wrote about this a few weeks back. I talked about how AI is helping power the next generation of defense technologies.
It's a future worth getting excited about. Today, I want to go even further, and clue you in to some of the opportunities out there in this unfolding, $80 billion investing mega-trend...
AI Investment Is Skyrocketing
The term artificial intelligence (AI) was coined back in 1956 at Dartmouth College. Over the decades since then, research in AI has advanced in fits and starts with multiple short-lived booms and research winters.
However, the last two decades saw the advent of cloud computing, big data, and improved algorithms. These have revolutionized the pace of AI research.
Quietly over the last 20 years we've started to roll AI technologies into everyday life (think about Siri or Alexa) and business.
This revolution in AI research has caught investor attention and investment in this sector has been booming.
AI startups raised a record $75 billion in VC fundraising in 2021. That's more than double the $36 billion invested in 2020.
(Source)
Without a doubt, it's AI's time to shine; it's presenting early investors with enormous potential returns in the decades to come. This is one of those early Amazon or Apple opportunities for investors.
When Siri first came out, "she" blew us away, quickly becoming just another feature of modern life.
However, in recent years we've seen some AI technologies released that "wow" us once again!
Why the Future of Artificial Intelligence Looks Even Better
OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company that a consortium of Silicon Valley's leading technologies such as Elon Musk created, is behind two of these new technologies.
The first is called GPT-3. It can generate paragraphs of essays of text when you feed it a few lines of information or context. Since its release, GPT-3 has been deployed in over 300 applications worldwide. It generates over 4.5 billion words daily.
Aside from GPT-3, OpenAI recently released DALLE-2. It's a mind-blowing tool that takes simple text descriptions and generate photorealistic images from them.
DALLE-2 can also edit existing photos and replace parts of the photo with whatever you ask for in a simple text description. DALLE-2 reminds me of the famous quote by science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
GPT-3 and DALLE-2 are just early tastes of the incredible things AI will be able to do in the next few years.
Miso Robotics - a company that I co-founded - is bringing AI into the kitchen to automate frying stations in quick-service restaurants. This would have been almost impossible to do a decade ago. Now it's reality. And that's just one of the many interesting projects the company is working on.
It's still the beginning of a decades-long AI boom.
While we've made huge progress from 1956, the fact is that there are thousands of applications of AI in the real world that are yet to be explored and invented.