Generative AI – What is it? What is its expected impact?

Just reading a report from Deloitte on progress with Generative AI in industry.

First of all – lets define Generative AI. Generative artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images or other data using generative models, often in response to prompts. Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generate new data that has similar characteristics. Wikipedia

Will generative AI (gen AI) be the greatest, most impactful technology innovation in
history? Will it completely transform how humans live and work? Or will it turn out to
be just another technology du jour that promised revolutionary change but ultimately
delivered only incremental improvement? Right now, we can’t be certain.
What we do know is that many breakthrough technologies of the past have followed
a common adoption pattern: initial awareness; excitement that led to hype; mild
disappointment as hype met reality; and then explosive growth once the technology
reached critical mass and proved its worth.
Generative AI seems to be following the same pattern, only much, much faster. ChatGPT
was publicly released on November 30, 2022, largely as a technology demonstration.
Two months later, it had already attracted an estimated 100 million active users—
making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.1
Since then, generative AI has continued to advance by leaps and bounds and many new
tools and use cases have emerged—providing a powerful glimpse at the technology’s
vast potential to transform how people live and work. ˆNow decides next