Hacker News, a social network where open-source developers check technology trends, recently announced that 'AI' has been mentioned 560% more frequently than the previous year, surpassing keywords such as cryptocurrency and iPhone, which have appeared in the most news headlines over the past 15 years. This means that AI has permeated into people's daily lives in 2023, taking over the entire technology industry, and the huge related trends will continue into next year.

This year, after OpenAI's generative AI began to dominate the market, Google and Meta rushed to release their own products, followed by the entry of new players and an open-source boom. Nvidia, a semiconductor company that designs GPUs for AI, achieved a 40% operating margin, and OpenAI, which has ChatGPT, with 100 million weekly active users, has reached a market value of 113 trillion won despite its non-profit status. Along with these changes in AI technology investment, 'AI' has been added to the existing complex and conflicting regulations regarding big tech companies' regulations, privacy protection, competitive structures, harmful content, bias, intellectual property, patents, and other issues that the world has been facing.

If we divide the process by which technology is introduced to the world and accepted by the public into three stages of the S-curve, where we identify value, get excited about the confirmed value, and get bored with the familiar value, 2023 can be said to be a year when various possibilities of market value for artificial intelligence were confirmed.

The following three phenomena can be seen to support this: First,the platform shift to generative AI has begun.Historically, in the flow of major platform changes in the technology industry, from PCs to web open source and cloud linked to smartphones, user conversations with generative AI, which are trying to approach AGI, have become a new standard for predicting the future of humanity.

Second,it was an opportunity for the public to become familiar with AI like never before.MS and Google's productivity programs, which were used in daily work around the world, have been connected to generative AI, and conversations with chatbots linked to internet search engines and various customer support services have become familiar to users. The phenomenon of disappearing existing communities where people could feel a sense of belonging as physical connections between people decrease has led to the discovery and rapid confirmation of the possibility of generative AI as a model conversational partner.

Third,the EU's new AI law agreement has been officially reached.This bill is the world's first comprehensive AI bill, and includes provisions to mitigate or prohibit harm in areas where AI use poses significant risks to fundamental rights, such as healthcare, education, border surveillance, and public services. It is a significant step towards a more mature acceptance of AI compared to previous markets and societies, as it establishes binding rules on potential risks associated with the indiscriminate use of AI.

2023 has certainly been a year of AI. However, it was also a year in which dystopian anxieties, which have no experiential context, have spread on a daily and personal level, as it was a time when people were excited about the possibilities and expectations for AI as a tool. In other words, along with the interest in AI,it was also a year that made people think quite concretely about 'what is the meaning of being human'.Keywords like design thinking and customer-centricity, which have been frequently appearing for over 15 years, seem to have been replaced by AI. However, just as clothes change from shorts to long pants depending on the season, interest in 'human' will eventually return. This is due to the phenomenon that discussions about AI's functionality and possibilities, which have been exploding recently, have focused too much on the distinction between machines and humans.

Humans are fundamentally different from AI through the very basic categories of time and space.Holidays and holidays have a warmer or more human feel than other times, and only humans have the criteria to experience different meanings depending on their situation, such as when they walk up the steps of a court, what situation they are in, and why they are in that place. Bill Gates, the founder of MS, predicted in his blog on the 19th that 2024 will be a year of turning points through AI technology. As AI's technical applications become more mature, next year should be an opportunity to focus on questions about humans, such as the environment we live in, the situations we face, and the elements that create the meaning of time and space, which are stages that only humans can experience with those around us. It will be the theme that is necessary for 2024 as a process of concretizing the form of coexistence between humans and AI.

References

Huge excitement within tech

"OpenAI, a non-profit organization with KRW 60 million in revenue, dominates ChatGPT worth KRW 113 trillion"

The EU Just Passed Sweeping New Rules to Regulate AI

The road ahead reaches a turning point in 2024⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠