The AI Spring

We are living in the AI Spring.

All the big players were holding back their research due to the experimental nature and rough edges of current implementations. OpenAI led one of the earliest moves, along with Stability.ai. Meta released LLaMA, a foundation model for natural language processing, under an open-source license. Stanford fine-tuned LLaMA and built Alpaca, which led to many other fine-tuning initiatives. IBM has released Watsonx. Baidu, Alibaba are testing their large language models. And probably Tencent too.

ChatGPT and Midjourney’s Discord interface made AI accessible to the public.

The ecosystem is also getting a boost. Vector databases are in the news, which helps AI to search and retain context. We are discovering data labeling services, tools and providers.

ChatGPT and Midjourney’s Discord interface made AI accessible to the public. Bing and Bard followed.

Things did not happen overnight. It was a work in progress. We now know Cohere.ai, Eleuther.ai, LAION, Carper AI, and many such companies.

Foundation models give a head start to researchers to experiment, fine-tune and apply AI to real-world solutions.

Now Meta has announced Megabyte, a different architecture than the current prevailing Transformer architecture, which was introduced by Google in 2017. Meta has open sourced DINOv2, a foundation model for computer vision. The foundation models (LLaMA, DINOv2 etc.) give a head start to researchers to experiment, fine-tune and apply AI to real-world solutions.

We are living in the AI Spring. The AI flowers are blooming everywhere. And there must be weeds and wild plants too.

It should not be a surprise to see countries building foundation models that reflect their language, culture, values, beliefs, and policies.

The UK government has created a task force for building a self-sovereign, reliable foundation model, as the capability and asset of the nation. It should be safe, reliable and governed for use-cases in government and healthcare. It should not be a surprise to see more countries building foundation models that reflect their language, culture, values, beliefs, and policies.

Once the governance is in place, AI might even be a regulated capability. Even an AI tax is a possibility. It will discourage companies advertising AI in their products without responsibility, accountability and safety standards.

We are living in the AI Spring. Soon it will be summer.