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Generative artificial intelligence is getting plenty of attention as of late. Whether it’s OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing, or Google's (GOOG, GOOGL) upcoming Bard, generative A.I. is seemingly all investors can talk about.
But according to Douglas Rushkoff, author and professor of media theory and digital economics at the City University of New York, Queens College, the software is already peaking, and what we're seeing now is nothing compared to the A.I. we’ll see in the future.
"Most of the companies we're looking at are just little apps built on top of the main existing A.I. platforms. OpenAI with Musk and Altman, Deepmind at Google, or Facebook’s (META) A.I., those are real. But looking forward, I feel like these companies will be understood as more of first-generation A.I.s," Rushkoff told Yahoo Finance Live.
According to Rushkoff, today's A.I. uses a one-to-one model, in which it's fed data from the internet to improve its capabilities.
In other words, when someone says a particular A.I. is two years ahead of a rival platform, it's because that first system has already been trained for two years, while the other is just starting to get off of the ground.
In the future, though, A.I. will require far less data to learn, which will help them leapfrog modern systems.
"Those are the ones that I'm most interested in," Rushkoff said. "These sort of multi-dimensional, fractal-style learning models."
And while ChatGPT is still a relatively new platform, Rushkoff says that he believes the generative chatbot is plateauing.
"I don't see ChatGPT itself getting that much better," Rushkoff said. "I think it represents a stage in the evolution of A.I., but I feel like the model is peaking. I think ChatGPT is a great application on OpenAI, but it's sort of, okay, now what?"
Still, generative A.I. is relatively new to most people. And with Bing still in an invite-only preview and Google’s Bard still in the testing phase, we'll likely see and hear plenty about similar services going forward.
Of course, ChatGPT and its ilk aren't perfect yet, either. Experts have criticized them for presenting inaccurate information or making up false statements out of whole cloth.
I've been using Bing, and while it’s been helpful with some tasks, it's also presented me with incorrect data.
Microsoft says it’s working to correct Bing's issues, which is also why it’s still in preview. Still, it will likely take time before these platforms are reliably accurate. As for those future services, who knows?