AI can now Think Deeper, and are you Ready?

The last 24 months can be summed up as a cycle of relentless curiosity. With the rapid advancements in the GPT/o series, it’s hard not to wonder how it all works and what’s coming next. Speaking of curiosity, let’s look at what’s transpired in just the past 2 weeks. Mustafa Suleyman's letter titled ‘AI Companion for Everyone,’ new updates to Copilot announced, and Meta's Orion, a wearable glasses with fully holographic AR (time will tell how this space evolves) unveiled at Meta Connect 2024. In my view, the curiosity engine in the industry just witnessed a glimpse of the next benchmark for consumer experiences.

For some time, my narrative has been that "AI can See, Hear, and Speak" (with GPT-4o). Now, with the release of o1-preview, I can confidently add to that: "AI can See, Hear, Speak, and also Think". In addition, the below two statements from the release notes on o1-preview on the growth of intelligence just made me reflect a bit on the trail ahead.

• In a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO), GPT-4o correctly solved only 13% of problems, while the o1 reasoning model scored 83%.
• For complex reasoning tasks o1-preview demonstrates significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability. Given this, we are resetting the counter back to 1 and naming this series OpenAI o1

Given this context, it's evident that the curiosity meter will keep rising, and these innovations push enterprises to reflect on their technology strategies. Enterprises that have been executing based on fixed, intended strategies should now embrace flexibility and adaptability. It's crucial to keep strategies open-ended, allowing room for emergent approaches that respond to evolving opportunities and challenges.

Considering innovations till date and the trail ahead, Enterprises should pivot largely on setting a solid foundation that would help them scale with time. Food for thought for Enterprises to reflect and invest to drive Business Innovation

1. Talent: Trail ahead requires specialist who can fathom the pace of innovation, reflect on the value and innovate on solutions/products. Building a skilled workforce, especially in areas like AI, machine learning, and data science, ensures that the company can navigate future innovations.
2. Data: Prioritizing building robust data management systems, ensuring data quality, security, and accessibility will be the single most differentiator for Enterprises to thrive in the age of AI
3. Compute: Investing in cloud, edge, or hybrid infrastructure services can provide the necessary flexibility and power to process large-scale datasets, support complex algorithms in real time.
4. Business Leadership:  Domain Specialists play a pivotal role in guiding AI initiatives to ensure they solve real-world problems and deliver tangible business value. Leaders with domain expertise are essential for making strategic decisions, prioritizing AI use cases, and driving innovation that resonates with the organization’s goals.
5. AI Governance: Build an Enterprise manifest to ensure ethical use, compliance, and risk management. The manifest includes policies around data privacy, guardrails for Language Models, inference explainability (algorithmic transparency) and bias mitigation.

For any business to successfully engineer innovation, the foundations mentioned above are essential for operating as an AI-led enterprise. As consumer expectations and experiences evolve, disruption is inevitable. Every enterprise will face a pivotal moment where the question of 'scale' arises, and the only way to accelerate from that point is by having these building blocks firmly in place. Without them, the necessary strength to scale is lost.

Returning to the trail of curiosity, imagine a world where a simple wearable glass can See, Hear, Speak, Think, and Remember as we navigate the world around us. A true copilot, and yes, this vision is closer to reality than ever, with the technical advancements already within reach.

Interesting times ahead…