2023: The Year AI really Exploded into a Revolution

Why AI exploded so much in 2023?

There has been so much coverage this year about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Probably one of the most hottest topics for conversation in tech this year, but why so much hype?

For starters, just last year, ChatGPT (OpenAI) announced their release on November 23, 2022, which helped get the ball rolling. - What else can we learn by doing a look back a little farther than last year?

Well, going back 4 years prior to 2019 might help us understand why AI grew so much more... and why such an explosion for AI this year in 2023.

Microsoft started investing early in AI

Back in July 2019, OpenAI (non profit founded in 2015) announced their partnership with Microsoft investing $1 billion to aid in further development and growth of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

With this initial investment of $ 1 billion, Microsoft would be able to further develop their Azure product to start utilizing AI. - Azure is Microsoft's top Cloud service product used for things like networking and storage for cloud computing.

Azure is also considered an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) type of technology. - Microsoft is still behind the leader (AWS) in Cloud.

This AI investment by Microsoft could possibly help Microsoft gain some marketshare from it's competitors for investments in AI... by injecting the AI technology into any or all of Microsoft products.

Microsoft again extends partnership and investment into AI

Then, earlier this year on January 23, 2023, it was reported that Microsoft would invest another $10 billion with OpenAI.

Semafor confirmed they reached out to OpenAI (ChatGPT) and confirmed the news within the company. A top analyst responded to Semafor with this: 

"It was a typical weekday morning on Wall Street. Traders and analysts bustled about, checking their screens and huddling in conference rooms. Suddenly, the news broke: Microsoft was investing $10 billion in OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence research lab."

Could this put Microsoft at the head of the table for AI investing when compared to other giants like Google, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Amazon? - Lets look at what Microsoft has been doing further in AI this year... and what Microsoft will release so far in terms of using AI in all their products.

What's next for AI and Microsoft?

Now that we see that Microsoft has invested $10 billion + in AI, we see that their new product for Windows 11 called Copilot using AI (Uses the OpenAI technology), was released and rolled out last week on September 26th for all Windows users.

Microsoft 365 Copilot will also be released next month on November 1, 2023 and will be in all their enterprise products such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc. It appears that Microsoft will also charge a monthly fee for these enterprise tools for corporations that have a need to help speed up things.

Will Bing get an upgrade utilizing AI?

Since Microsoft has such a smaller share for customers who use their search product "Bing" for internet searches, you can bet Microsoft will be planning on using AI for Bing to hopefully start gaining more market share from the king, Google.

Microsoft is way behind when it comes to search engine providers.

Statscounter for Google Marketshare  shows Google has 91.56% from a world-wide market share perspective for the search engine market, compared to Microsoft's Bing at a measly share of 3.03%.

Where will AI go from here?

If AI turns out to be the best thing since slice bread, the other tech giants won't want be left behind in the dust when it comes to AI. The other tech giants will start investing into AI as well and the competition will continue to heat up and explode further.

For example, since Microsoft has shown to be so busy with AI in the past half decade, just last week, Amazon announced that they invested $4 billion in AI in an AI startup called Anthropic... that will keep the ball rolling for more excitement on AI.

Will AI continue to explode for years to come?

As mentioned above and as the AI wars continue with all the tech giants, I'm sure AI will continue to be a hot topic for years to come.

Also, another aspect to consider is the dark side of AI, where bad actors will be looking to utilizing AI for hacking and spreading malware. Cybersecurity defenses will need to be seriously considered as this will be another hot subject, which has been on the rise and discussion from the growth of AI.