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The generative AI (GAI) arms race has begun, and the fear of missing out has its grip on everyone.

Yunqi L i writing for Wired magazine

Ayman Alashkar, Founder and CEO of UAE AI startup overwrite.ai, talks to Middle East’s Wired Magazine about “high accuracy, outcome-oriented content” and trends around the business application for GAI.

At the end of 2022, social media was stirred up by a chatbot that could produce text responses or create content guided by simple prompts in a stunningly human way. We’re of course talking about ChatGPT, a generative AI (GAI) that can create text based on training data it has received.

When ChatGPT’s flickering cursor moves across the screen and types out text in a few seconds, or when artworks generated by DALL-E (an AI image generator also developed by OpenAI) win art competitions, many of us are both thrilled and scared. A future where AI can undertake increasingly complicated tasks and eventually replace humans seems ever more possible. According to research by Gartner in 2023, by 2025, the global market for GAI is expected to reach $18.5 billion, with 75 percent of enterprises using some form of GAI technology in their businesses. Naturally, the GAI arms race is becoming fierce among the tech giants, and no one wants to be left out.

The Game Players

All in the race: Microsoft, OpenAI, AWS and Hugging Face, Baidu, META

A Healthy Competition

For the public, it is reassuring when a top AI scientist like Yann LeCun, a Turing Award recipient, says that GAI like ChatGPT has “no knowledge of the world around them” and that they are merely “typing, writing aids.”

“I agree that at this point, ChatGPT is best to be seen as a typing and writing aid, and also one that requires a lot of attention,” said Professor Preslav Nakov, Acting Deputy Department Chair of the NLP department at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.

For smaller players in the GAI game, the competition is a healthy sign. “It promotes research and development and provides more options for businesses and developers to leverage AI,”

Prof. Nakov also thinks of it as a stimulation of development. He compared the situation to how the iPhone revolutionized smartphones and sparked the development of similar technology,

“I expect several ChatGPT-like projects to flourish in the coming years and even months, and there are already serious competitors eager to catch up and improve,” he says.

“My big concerns are around the ethics we have to deal with,” says Senese. The ethical dilemmas linked to GAI may result in a tumultuous human-AI relationship.

The Middle East’s take on generative AI

The tornado of GAI has swept across the globe.

“A 2023 survey of 1,000 US business leaders found that 49 percent of companies currently use ChatGPT, and another 30 percent plan to,” Prof. Nakov pointed out.

The Middle East is not isolated from this. ChatGPT has been a topic of discussion within the UAE government leadership, with some entities like DEWA (Dubai Electricity and Water Authority) already adopting it.

The region’s blossoming startup culture is embracing increasing numbers of AI startups.

Other industries, such as real estate, oil and gas, and healthcare, are also steering toward an AI-powered future.

Ayman Alashkar, the founder of overwrite.ai, is an active public speaker and leader in AI. He believes that the trend around the business application for GAI “lies in outcome-oriented content, where high accuracy is important”.

With a background in UAE’s real estate industry, Alashkar developed overwrite.ai, a highly efficient real estate-themed GAI.

Dr. Hector Ren, Director of Engineering and Production at Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI), also observed this trend. “It is believed that smaller companies will lead the trend by providing specialized tools and services that support the development and deployment of language models,” he says.

The Middle East to become a major player in AI development

In the UAE, breakthroughs in Arabic LLM are also happening quickly, creating opportunities for the Middle East to become a major player in AI development. Engineers at IIAI, a G42 company, have created the largest Arabic LLM with 13 billion parameters to date. Dr. Ren viewed it as a milestone for the Arabic NLP field that will significantly benefit the Arab world.

The GAI arms race is only just beginning. Indeed, the competition will foster revolutionary changes in our society across various industries.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of overwrite.ai and its owners.

This story has been published from an article published in WIRED May, 2023.

Only the article length, headline and images have been edited to fit this blog. The original article is linked below.

More about overwrite.ai

overwrite.ai is a Foundation Language Model. A pioneering themed generative AI, delivering engagement-oriented content for the real estate industry, overwrite.ai creates the marketing content that powers the real estate industries of the UAE, KSA, Egypt and Lebanon.

For informative news and views on the world of real estate, proptech and AI, follow overwrite on Instagram and LinkedIn, and keep up-to-date with our weekly NewsBites blog.

overwrite.ai | real estate themed generative AI

The buzz around generative AI today is deafening. No topic in the world of technology is attracting more attention and hype right now.

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence that can generate novel content, rather than simply analyzing or acting on existing data.

The white-hot epicenter of today’s generative AI craze has been text-to-image AI.

It was the sudden emergence of these text-to-image AI models over the summer that catalyzed today’s generative AI frenzy: billion-dollar funding rounds for nascent startups, nonstop media coverage, and waves of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists hastily rebranding themselves as AI-focused.

It makes sense that text-to-image AI, more than any other area of artificial intelligence, has so captivated the public’s imagination. Images are aesthetically appealing, easy to consume, fun to share, ideally suited to go viral.

The AI Avatar trend went viral in late 2022

Text-to-image AI is incredibly powerful technology

And to be sure, text-to-image AI is incredibly powerful technology. The images that these models can produce are breathtaking in their originality and sophistication. Image-generating AI will transform industries including advertising, gaming and filmmaking.

Reimagining Albert Einstein, through Generative AI

But make no mistake: current buzz notwithstanding, AI-powered text generation will create many orders of magnitude more value than will AI-powered image generation in the years ahead.
Machines’ ability to generate language—to write and speak—will prove to be far more transformative than their ability to generate visual content.

The Power of the Written Word

Language is humanity’s single most important invention. More than anything else, it is what sets us apart from every other species on the planet.

Almost nothing about modern civilization would be possible without language.

To illustrate the depth and breadth of the coming transformation, let’s walk through some example applications.

From Sales to Science

The first true “killer application” for generative text, in terms of commercial adoption, has proven to be copywriting: that is, AI-generated website copy, social media posts, blog posts and other marketing-related written content.

AI-powered copywriting has seen stunning revenue growth over the past year.

Jasper, one of the leading startups in this category, launched a mere 18 months ago and will reportedly do $75 million in revenue this year, making it one of the fastest-growing software startups ever. Jasper just announced a $125 million fundraise valuing the company at $1.5 billion. Unsurprisingly, a raft of competitors has emerged to chase this market.

Copywriting is just the beginning

Generative AI will transform the world of customer service and call centers, across industries: from hospitality to ecommerce, from healthcare to financial services. The same goes for internal IT and HR helpdesks.

Language models (like overwrite.ai) can already automate much of the work that happens before, during and after customer service conversations, including in-call agent coaching and after-call documentation and summarization.

Soon, paired with generative text-to-speech technology, they will be able to handle most customer service engagements end-to-end, with no human needed—not in the stilted, brittle, rules-based way that automated call centers have worked for years, but in fluid natural language that is effectively indistinguishable from a human agent.

To put it simply: nearly all of the interactions that you as a consumer will need to have with a brand or company, on any topic, can and will be automated.

For some lower-stakes use cases—say, writing outbound sales emails or website copy—the technology will soon be advanced and robust enough that users motivated by the potential productivity gains will feel comfortable automating the application end-to-end, with no human in the loop at all.

At the other end of the spectrum, some safety-critical use cases—say, using generative models to diagnose and propose treatments for individual patients—will for the foreseeable future require a human in the loop to review and approve the models’ output before any real action is taken.

But make no mistake: generative language technology is improving fast—almost unbelievably fast.

Within months, expect industry leaders like OpenAI and Cohere to release new models that represent dramatic, step-change improvements in language capabilities compared to today’s models (which themselves are already breathtakingly powerful).

Over the longer term, the trend will be decisive and inevitable: as these models get better, and as the products built on top of them become easier to use and more deeply embedded in existing workflows, we will hand over more responsibility for more of society’s day-to-day functions to AI, with little or no human oversight. More and more of the use cases described above will be carried out end-to-end, in a closed-loop manner, by language models that we have empowered to decide and act.

This may sound startling, even terrifying, to readers today. But we will increasingly acclimate to the reality that machines can carry out many of these functions more effectively, more quickly, more affordably and more reliably than humans could.

Massive disruption, vast value creation, painful job dislocation and many new multi-billion-dollar AI-first companies are around the corner.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of overwrite.ai and its owners.

Rob Toews writes for Forbes.

This story has been published from an article in Forbes published on 6th November 2022.