Talking about AI has been Analytics India Magazine’s bread and butter for over a decade but 2023 marked a year when the subject of academic papers and Silicon Valley boardrooms burst into the mainstream. Thanks in no small part to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, last week, the Collins Dictionary also announced “AI ” as the word of the year. The term was used 4x more times than last year, the publisher said.  

“Considered to be the next great technological revolution, AI has seen rapid development and has been much talked about in 2023,” the UK dictionary, published by HarperCollins in Glasgow, noted in the blog post.

The chatter about the word was non-stop as all around the year industry leaders couldn’t stop talking about it be it Google or Microsoft. According to Alex Beecroft, managing director at Collins, AI was chosen as the word of the year because of its presence in daily life, akin to email and streaming platforms. “People use AI in multiple ways now, and it’s everywhere,” he mentioned. 

Higher Purpose  

The use of the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or AI dates back to the 1950s but all these years the technology has only been well known among a small group of people researching and developing it. When ChatGPT was launched last year, the power of this tech was shared with the general population making it more mainstream than ever. 

Ever since the AI-powered chatbot took over the internet people have been discussing a spectrum of possibilities from AI destroying humanity to unlocking new possibilities. Technology has severely impacted the way education has functioned up until now, how art was made and even led to the longest-ever strike Hollywood had seen. 

But here’s the thing, the term AI has been highly associated with ChatGPT and image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney even though it is just a part of the umbrella. The human-mimicking tech falls under the category of ‘Generative AI’ which has become the center of a growing conversation about what artificial intelligence can achieve.

AI’s power goes beyond just its ability to excite the public’s imagination. Other AI-powered tools are doing far beyond recreating versions of original text or images. For instance, Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold is an AI algorithm for predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins. The AI lab’s ‘Gift to Humanity’ has proven since its launch how AI can help develop vaccines and help increase the speed of drug discovery. 

Similarly, last year the lab solved a 50-year-old math problem using AI. DeepMind published a paper where they presented AlphaTensor, an algorithm able to find faster ways of doing one of the most common algebra operations: matrix multiplication. This development is significant as matrices are relevant in every aspect of our daily lives, from processing images on our phones and recognising speech commands to generating graphics for computer games. 

Deja Vous

While such significant developments are being made in AI, ChatGPT remains the most loved byproduct of the technology. One of the reasons is the amount of money being spent on it.

Interestingly, two years ago, Collins Dictionary chose ‘NFT’ as the word of the year. The form of technology saw a similar trajectory as GPTs. The bubble around it officially burst earlier this year as 95% of the NFTs became effectively worthless, a study stated. Out of a total of 73,257 NFT collections examined 69,795 of them held a market capitalisation of precisely zero Ether. 

Coming back to AI which is more or less about ChatGPT today, a similar trend is visibly forming. Even OpenAI chief Sam Altman has publicly stated that “It’s wildly overhyped in the short-term.” For now, all fingers are crossed that AI and more particularly ChatGPT does not face the same fate as NFTs after being picked as the word of the year.