SMEs facing the new AI revolution

Igor García Olaizola, 27th March 2023

The emergence of Generative AI systems in 2022 will mark a milestone in the history of AI and probably in the history of digital services. Their impact (derived in turn from the deep neural networks that a little more than a decade ago marked a radical change in how problems related mainly to image and language analysis were tackled) on society, education, the media as well as different economic and industrial sectors, may become similar to the irruption of the Internet two decades ago.

ChatGPT has become the leading example of Generalist Artificial Intelligence with language "understanding" capabilities that go far beyond any other technology developed so far. Capable of solving logic and mathematical problems, creating quality texts, analysing and proposing code in virtually any programming language, etc., the potential of its use is still unexplored. Moreover, the imminent release of the GPT4-trained version has already been announced, with multimodal capabilities that add to the text processing the inclusion of images and videos and that overcomes some of the limitations identified in the previous version. Microsoft, having invested in the order of a billion dollars in OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT and other benchmark Generative AI models), has connected ChatGPT to its Bing search engine and for the first time has become a real threat to Google.

Along with ChatGPT, other types of Generative AI tools continue to appear, aimed at generating photorealistic or artistic images (Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney), 3D (Point-E, CLIP-MESH), Music (MusicLM), etc.

In this new context, much is being said about its impact on education, ethical aspects, etc. It is also essential to consider the main keys to how Generative AI technologies will impact on the competitiveness of companies, and also to understand that within this revolution, Predictive AI is experiencing a more moderate technological advance. The effect of the direct use of these tools in professional activities such as software development, report generation, text translation, design and artistic content generation, etc. is evident. These types of activities are already a fact that many professionals are benefiting from and we can expect that they will permeate any action in our daily lives. However, as in most technological fields, the competitive advantage does not lie in the use of general technologies but in adapting them in a way that can offer a differential value. This will require having the knowledge and technological capabilities to adapt and specialise Generative AI models to niche applications where companies can compete thanks to their expert knowledge, where increasingly, R+D+i initiatives are becoming essential activities for companies to incorporate scientific and technological advances in their processes, products and services.

At Vicomtech we have been generating scientific/technological knowledge of excellence related to digitalisation, data analytics and Artificial Intelligence for more than 20 years, and successfully applying this knowledge in Basque companies, thus boosting their competitiveness and allowing them to participate in the technological advances that are taking place worldwide.