Amidst NVIDIA’s dramatic ascent in stock price, Amazon’s (nearly) $3 billion investment in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, and Adobe’s introduction of AI assistant ‘Acrobat’, the Artificial Intelligence arms race is rapidly heating up. The proliferation of AI content and firms reflects a trend that may impact broader society for decades to come. As Mr. Sivasubramanian, the vice president of data and AI at an Amazon subsidiary, asserted, “Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time”.
Amazon’s March 27th investment brings its total stake in Anthropic to $4 billion, cementing a partnership that marks Amazon’s entry into yet another industry. Together, Amazon and Anthropic are developing foundation models, technology (such as Chat-GPT) that has been pre-trained with large data sets to return various outputs and, by extension, accomplish a broad array of tasks. Under the newly established agreement between the two companies, Anthropic AI models will be provided to customers of AWS (a cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon) through a separate service known as Amazon Bedrock; already, Amazon has announced use of Bedrock’s AI applications from companies like Delta Air Lines.
On April 15, Adobe unveiled Acrobat, an AI assistant specializing in the processing of documents for user convenience. Charging $4.99 per month, Acrobat can “locate specific information, generate summaries and provide citations drawn from the text” (Koller), proving especially useful for students, lawyers, and others engaged in frequent document analysis. Acrobat provides further competition in a soon-to-be very tight industry: ChatGPT (Open AI), xAI (Elon Musk), Gemini (Google), and Meta AI (Meta) are all competing for share in a market that has not even demonstrated a capacity to generate profit yet.
Ultimately, if recent developments are indicative of anything, artificial intelligence is the future of society. Companies have recognized this, manifesting in the designation of tens of billions of dollars towards research and development. Investors have recognized this, with the stock price of technology companies like NVIDIA swelling in the past year as a result. Finally, as services like ChatGPT develop further, average consumers will recognize this. It can only be hoped that the quality-of-life changes accompanying AI advancement will trump its projected downsides—severe worker displacement, exacerbation of online misinformation, and a complete automation of the arts.
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