LONDON - 2023 is likely to be an eventful year for artificial intelligence (AI), with plenty of things to keep an eye on both in the immediate future and the longer term. This article will lay out some of the possibilities, and various scenarios that might unfold.

Big bangs

2022 marked the 10th anniversary of the big bang in AI, when Geoff Hinton and some of his colleagues introduced deep learning, a relaunch of neural networks. Deep learning enabled the Big Tech firms in the United States and China to build products and services which generated enormous amounts of money - the first time that AI was actually lucrative.

This year was also the fifth anniversary of a second big bang in AI - the advent of transformer models like GPT-3 and Dall-E. These are AI systems which achieve remarkable results by predicting what token (a piece of text or image) will come next in a sequence. In the last couple of years, AI researchers at OpenAI, Deep Mind and others have leapfrogged each other by announcing increasingly powerful natural language processing transformer models. They are also known as large language models, or foundation models.

Bigger and bigger

These models amaze people by producing human-like text, photorealistic images - and more recently, video sequences - when prompted by a single sentence. During 2023, these models will get even larger and more powerful. They will also continue to surprise researchers with their capabilities, and will become less ‘brittle,’ i.e., less inclined to make what look to humans like silly mistakes.

Partly as a result of this, more people will start to take the possibility that artificial general intelligence (AGI) and then superintelligence may arrive