In the next two weeks we are seeing
- Apples “let loose” on May 7th
- Google’s I/O on May 14th
- Somewhere maybe in between, Open AI’s launch of a Search service
This would be nothing out of the ordinary if it wasn’t for the spectre of ChatGPT 5.0 looming large (Summer 2024?). Both Apple and Google are just a bit too old and fat to drive the emergence of AI, so are looking to be on shaky ground.
How much of this is a game-changer?
Well, arguably, Apple are very late to the AI party but do control the hardware so expect some “on-board” AI-ready stuff as part of the new M4 processor. Google is struggling with a maturing corporate culture that is leaking a lot of talent – and remember Google paid out their first ever dividend recently – so Big G is ripe to be disrupted.
And Open AI is backed by Microsoft, who lost the race to search two decades ago – so just maybe OpenAI’s new search product could turn the whole Big G monopoly on its head. It’s likely that the new Bing/OpenAI search facility will open the whole advertising world up, so expect to see a period of turmoil in and around digital advertising, making it more expensive to acquire leads and sales across the board as huge amount of money will be thrown at anything that purports to be AI.
Where does that leave us? Well, we’ve quietly been building core competencies in more than a few AI projects, including bespoke-trained GPT models and, maybe significantly, restructuring client-focused data and learning into AI-digestible chunks. We think our clients will be well placed to take advantage of the coming disruption and we’ll lead the way into the space leaving many legacy-style agencies floundering to catch up.
The race in the AI space has already started and if you’re not building this into the heart of what you do then you’ve got a lot of catching to do. Why not come and talk to us.
UPDATE: 16/5/24
Well that was a bit of damp squib. Despite the promise of ever-accelerating AI gains we saw Apple release, erm, an OLED screen for the iPad, Google released Angry Birds for your car – only joking … Google and Open AI released multi-modal (voice/image) version of their GPTs which is the first step to changing how we discover stuff (i.e. search) and that’s pretty promising. Having played with ChatGPT 4 Omni it is a step forward and is also capable of (some) reasoning and solving complex math problems (that no one really needs).
