[The Editors' Verdict]Are We Prepared for the Era of Generative AI?

On the 17th, during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, while world-renowned scholars were drawing media attention by discussing the ongoing economic recession, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft (MS), participated as a panelist at an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal and made an important announcement about the future of artificial intelligence (AI).

He stated that MS will embed AI features like ChatGPT into all its upcoming products and make them the platform for its major services. He explained, "Just as mobile and cloud technologies became mainstream over the past 15 years, AI is showing a similar platform shift." He presented a vision that innovation akin to the revolutionary change Apple brought to business with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 will happen once again through AI.

A few days later, MS announced an additional investment of $10 billion (approximately 12 trillion KRW) in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, released by OpenAI in November last year, has already emerged as the biggest topic in the AI field this year, even before MS’s investment announcement. When users input questions, ChatGPT provides appropriate answers in real time, with a level and depth far beyond previous chatbots. It is primarily based on English but also supports Korean. For example, if asked to "explain the Korean War," it summarizes the origins and developments of the Korean War in about 300 characters. When requested to write a poem about "winter rain," it quickly composed a five-line poem.

Before releasing ChatGPT, OpenAI surprised the industry in January 2021 by unveiling ‘Dall-E,’ an image generation technology. This technology creates images automatically when users input text in English or upload image files.

Technologies like ChatGPT and Dall-E are classified as ‘Generative AI.’ AI experts are excited, believing that Generative AI will dramatically expand AI’s application fields and open new horizons.

Alex Wang, CEO of AI startup Scale AI, compared this to the ‘Cambrian Explosion’ in an interview with the UK’s Financial Times (FT). Just as a wide variety of animals suddenly appeared in a relatively short period during the Cambrian period about 540 million years ago, the applications of AI could greatly increase. On the other hand, intense debates are ongoing about the misuse and limitations of this technology.

Generative AI is already being utilized in the coding field. MS’s GitHub team has developed automatic code generation technology in collaboration with OpenAI. MS applies this technology to about 40% of the code developed by programmers and plans to expand this ratio to 80% within five years.

So far, AI has gone through several cycles of technological progress and stagnation. When Google’s AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol 9-dan in 2016, many thought AI would change everything instantly, but the changes have proceeded more slowly than expected. What about Generative AI, represented by ChatGPT? If, as CEO Nadella predicts, it is likely to be a ‘platform shift,’ are we truly prepared for it?

Hee-jong Kang, Content Manager