Dear friends,
Is AI progressing rapidly? Yes! But while the progress of underlying AI technology has indeed sped up over the past 2 years, the fastest acceleration is in applications.
Consider this: GPT-4 was released March 2023. Since then, models have become much faster, cheaper, sometimes smaller, more multimodal, and better at reasoning, and many more open weight versions are available — so progress has been fantastic! (Claims that AI is “hitting a wall” seem extremely ill-informed.) But more significantly, many applications that already were theoretically possible using the March 2023 version of GPT-4 — in areas such as customer service, question answering, and process automation — now have significant early momentum.
I’m confident 2025 will see even faster and more exciting advances than 2024 in both AI technology and applications. Looking back, the one thing that could have stopped AI was bad, anti-competitive regulation that would have put onerous burdens on developers, particularly of open models. So long as we remain vigilant and hold off these anti-innovation forces, we’ll keep up or even further accelerate progress.
I’m also seeing a widening gap between those at the cutting edge (which includes many readers of The Batch!) and those who have not yet tried out ChatGPT even once (yes, a lot of people are still in this group!). As technology changes around us, we all have to keep up to remain relevant and be able to make significant contributions. I’m committed to making sure DeepLearning.AI continues to help you learn the most useful and important AI technologies. If you’re making New Year’s resolutions, I hope you’ll include us in your learning plan!
AI is the most important technological change happening in the world right now. I’m thrilled to be working in this exciting sector alongside you, and I’m grateful for your efforts to learn about and apply it to better the lives of yourself and others.
Happy holidays!
Andrew