Opportunities on the Horizon: Investing Through a Slowing Economy

Thematic Updates | WEALTH OUTLOOK 2023 | MID-YEAR EDITION | 58 The internet, Wall Street and just about every manager in every business have been buzzing about AI chatbots since a wave of new launches began in November 2022. It took just five days for a popular AI chatbot to reach 1 million users, compared to 10months for another popular social media company and 3.5 years for a common streaming service ( FIGURE 1 ) . Tech giants and startups alike are racing to develop ever more intelligent AI algorithms to get a toehold in the next generation of computing. In short, we are likely witnessing the birth of a technology as significant as the internet. 1 What is generative AI? These new AI-driven chatbots use technology known as generative AI, which is machine learning taken to an entirely new level. When we talk to Alexa or Siri, we are actively engaging with machine learning. Machine learning is also what drives weather prediction and statistical modeling across industries. It drives the estimates of likely outcomes we see for everything from betting odds in sports to the probability of an earthquake in a vulnerable city. What makes generative AI models such a breakthrough is their ability to discern context and create new content, drawing frommassive amounts of data. When starting a sentence, generative AI can predict with high accuracy how it will end. To build the models, some of the world’s best data scientists and computer 1 ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about OpenAI’s GPT-4 upgrade | BBC Science FocusMagazine, 2023 engineers trained models using 570GB of books, webtext and articles from across the internet. Whereas machine learning could identify pictures of animals or patterns from data, generative AI can generate images of animals based on all available similar images or write unique paragraphs about historical events with appropriate contextual references to time, place and participants. Ultimately, generative AI may change how a broad range of jobs are performed across almost every industry. Researchers using generative AI can quickly summarize complex topics, a development that worries educators that want to see students produce original work. AI will help humans with increasingly intensive tasks and generate new content or ideas. The quality of the models can produce outputs that are, in certain cases, indistinguishable from human-generated content. AI will likely require that we revisit the concept of “original content” given its ability to “invent”. In medicine, AI may be able to predict what sequence a “next newmedicine” might take by looking at prior molecules or compounds. FIGURE 1 : Worldwide Google Searches for ‘Artificial Intelligence’ 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 '10 '11 '12 '13 '14 '15 '16 '17 '18 '19 '20 '21 '22 '23 100 = peak popularity Worldwide Google searches for "artificial intelligence" Source: Google as of April 18, 2023.