In 2020, artificial intelligence continued to make great strides despite the pandemic. Milestones like GPT-3 and AlphaFold represent exciting achievements that demonstrate the rapid development of ai technology. These breakthroughs not only push the boundaries of what ai can achieve, but also open up new commercial applications and investment opportunities across industries.
GPT-3 shows ai’s ability to perform complex language tasks
OpenAI’s release of GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, is a major advance in ai’s ability to understand and generate human language. Its impressive performance across a range of natural language processing tasks has significant implications for industries like customer service, marketing and content creation. As more companies integrate large language models into their products and services, there is growing investor interest in startups developing commercial applications of models like GPT-3.
Advances in computer vision enable new functions for edge devices
In computer vision, EfficientNet-D7 from Google stands out for enabling high-performance object detection that is up to 4-9x smaller and 5-11x faster compared to previous models. Optimized for edge devices, advances like this are opening possibilities for computer vision applications on mobile and internet-of-things devices. As devices with embedded computer vision capabilities become more pervasive, investors are paying attention to startups using cv algorithms to develop innovative consumer and industrial applications.
Reinforcement learning milestones point to future automation potential
Agent57 from DeepMind mastered a broad range of Atari games at superhuman level through a combination of deep reinforcement learning, planning, model-based training and other techniques. As reinforcement learning matures to handle more complex real-world tasks, it holds promise for increasing automation and optimizing systems ranging from warehouses to financial trading. Investors already see business potential in rl, with prominent examples like Covariant using rl for industrial robotics automation.
Advancing the foundations of ai to enable new capabilities
AlphaFold from DeepMind has been hailed as a breakthrough in determining protein folding structures that has eluded scientists for over 50 years. By advancing fundamental capabilities in ai like reasoning and prediction, innovations in foundational areas can massively expand the scope of what ai can achieve. As research translates new fundamental advances into commercial applications over time, it creates opportunities for long-term investments into the companies leading these cutting-edge ai capabilities.
The rapid progress made in ai during 2020 brings not just technological milestones, but also new commercial possibilities that investors are excited about. As ai continues advancing at breakneck pace, we can expect waves of technological and application innovations that transform existing industries while giving rise to new ones.