AI Gets to Work

It's leading-edge, it's downright scary and it's here. Following AI's breakout year, we take a look under the hood at how entrepreneurs are applying the tech and what you need to know to stay competitive.

- Phillip Toledano

Ever since Alan Turing posed the question "Can machines think?" in 1950, fellow scientists have thrown themselves into programming machines to take over tasks traditionally considered to require human cognition. The central question of his defining "Imitation Game" paper is more essential than ever.

After OpenAI launched its shot across the bow with the November 2022 release of ChatGPT, kicking off a ferocious AI arms race, startups across industries from supply chains to SaaS, and major players including Amazon and Google, accelerated their AI product rollouts. Investors were quick to fan the flames. In 2023, they directed $1 of every $3 into AI companies. The first quarter of 2024 is expected to keep pace, per PitchBook analyst Brendan Burke. Paris-based OpenAI competitor Mistral, not even nine months old, fetched a valuation of $2 billion after a $415 million fund raise in December, which led to deals with Microsoft and IBM earlier this year.

So while AI isn't new, the pace of innovation is having a material effect: chiefly, that AI is becoming more approachable. Already, the use cases for AI-from drafting marketing copy to scrubbing code-are proliferating, as are scarcely imagined ideas for how to run a company better, faster, stronger.

That's not to say the path ahead is free of obstacles, not the least of which is the fear robots could turn on us, as in the most searing works of science fiction.