Dive Brief:
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The co-founder of AI startup Vicarious predicts that the tech industry is on the cusp of a major breakthrough in AI, CIO reports.
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D. Scott Phoenix said the availability of huge amounts of data and cheap storage, memory and computing power will enable AI to make a major leap as soon as this summer.
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A Bank of America report citing IDC research recently predicted that the AI industry will grow to $70 billion by 2020 from just $8.2 billion in 2013.
Dive Insight:
"We saw something similar in the early days of software -- and the early days of the Internet," Phoenix told CIO. "We're entering that era of rapid improvement."
Vicarious hasn’t revealed much about what it plans to unveil next, but the company has been working hard to make AI more “general-purpose.”
Phoenix isn’t alone in his prediction. Earlier this month, a number of tech industry leaders, including Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, predicted that artificial intelligence and machine learning will soon change life as we know it.
Bezos said Amazon currently has 1,000 employees working on Alexa, Amazon’s voice-based smart assistant software system. But AI also has the potential to revolutionize enterprise technology.
Many industries—from law and education to manufacturing and medicine—are already employing AI technologies, according to a recent AI forecast from Tractica. Tractica predicts the AI systems market for enterprise applications will increase from $202.5 million in 2015 to $11.1 billion by 2024.
Phoenix said the fact that even tiny advances realized through AI can have an enormous effect on enterprise revenue means many companies are focusing their efforts there.
In April, Google CEO Sundar Pichai emphasized machine learning and artificial intelligence as one of the prime areas for growth in the future. He pointed to that technology as key for boosting the company performance in advertising and cloud services. He also looked toward the trend of "AI first," which he says the company is at the forefront of.
