(title image: “A cute corgi lives in a house made out of sushi”, from the Imagen paper)

Media generation

Earlier this year OpenAI released DALL·E 2 to the world, and since then it seems that AI generated images have not stopped being the center of attention in the public eye. While OpenAI has maintained this project with restricted access and works such as Google’s Imagen and Parti have not been released publicly, other challengers such as Craiyon, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have risen to give the general public access to these new media generation tools.

This explosion of models in image generation is just the beginning of an avalanche of high quality AI tools that will appear in the next few years that will help out in the creation of new media within the creative realm. Music tools such as Jukebox and RAVE, text-to-video models like Transframer or CogVideo, 3D synthesis with NERF models and GPT based text generation services like NovelAI are just a few examples of what the future holds.

Keep an eye out, what are just a couple of thousands of AI generated images in our social media feed is going to grow in size very soon!

Healthcare

With the increasing rise of data available, more and more healthcare providers are starting to use and implement AI in applications to develop better treatments for diseases and improve accuracy of diagnoses. Take the applicaction of AI such as in medical imaging, with projects like fastMRI.

The development of drug discovery with AI thanks to projects like DeepMind’s AlphaFold could lead down the line to personalized medicine that would allow treatments to be tailored to the specific characteristics of individual patients and improve scientific research in the life sciences.

Education

As a way to make use of new technologies, educational institutions are starting to empower learning through the usage of AI. Personalized learning experiences, assistance in the identification of poor performing subjects or relevant real-time feedback to students and teachers are just some of the ways that this technology can further boost the learning process.

Independent AI empowered apps such as Duolingo and Grammerly have seen wide use and show the power and need of this technology in the educational sphere.

Accessibility

Ever since the dawn of natural-language processing there has been a high interest in the creation of systems capable of helping out and improving accessibility to resources. Thanks to the new era of deep learning, we are finally seeing the frequent use of AI multimodal powered solutions that greatly improve the quality of life of users with the usage of text-to-speech readers, speech recognition, machine translation and image recognition in the creation of auto-generated captions for content.

Home Appliances

What started with a couple of robot vacuum cleaners bumping into walls has accelerated in recent years with the emergence of a multitude of applications and gadgets that transform our homes into “smart homes”. In this context, the integration of IoT (Internet of Things) and developments in AI have served as a major backbone in the improvement and popularity in the market of these products.

From AI driven security cameras and smart home devices to smart fridges and virtual reality, AI will make its way very soon into our homes and lives one way or another.

Customer Service

More and more companies are starting to rely on AI-enabled tools such as AI chatbots and conversational agents to automate routine customer service tasks and serve as the primary interface between businesses and customers. Compared to their human counterparts, they can provide 24/7 service and can handle large volumes of inquiries, and more often than not they can provide a similar level of customer satisfaction, providing personalized service and handling complex inquiries.

Works like Meta’s BlenderBot3 and projects like character.ai are just a glimpse at how much these models will improve in the future.

Manufacturing and Industry

Just like the European Commission explains, in recent years AI has been critical for the success of small and medium-sized enterprises and particularly in industry and manufacturing, where AI solutions are becoming ever more important as they help to optimize production processes, predict machinery failures and develop more efficient smart services. Andrew Ng’s landing.ai is just one example of the different AI based companies that have taken over this area.

The usage of AI in the growth and development of the industry will provide all forms of support to enhance its competitiveness and enable it to play its role effectively.

Urban planning

In the last few years, the usage of artificial intelligence in urban planning and the creation of smart cities has started to appear all over the world. There are many benefits to using AI in this context. For example, AI can be utilized to create more accurate models of urban environments with the usage of systems capable of predicting traffic patterns and congestion or applications that help understand how a new development might impact the surrounding area. Other uses where AI can help out are in the automation of data collection and analysis or with the creation of virtual simulations of urban environments, such as in Autodesk Spacemaker, which can be used to test out different planning scenarios before they are implemented in the real world.

All of these can help free up city planners to focus on more creative and strategic tasks and to engage with citizens in a more interactive and personalized way, where they can provide and collect better information and feedback about city services.

Transport

The transport industry is a major contributor to the global economy and artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in it. Companies are starting to use and develop better and more efficient transport systems through AI.

While the vehicle and automobile industry first comes to mind in this area, with big names such as Tesla specialized in autonomous driving and the safety of transport systems, we are starting to see an increase usage of AI to generally improve other related areas such as the shipping industry. Better planned schedules of maintenance and repair tasks or efficiently routing vehicles are just a couple of the improvements that AI systems can help out to drastically reduce costs.

Discovery

We live in a world where we are daily bombarded with the amount of data available in the digital age. Where as before we needed to rely on word of mouth and experts, information retrieval tools such as AI based recommendation systems have appeared to reliably process this new data, providing companies services that offer relevant discovery solutions to end users.

As an example of this recent trend, take TikTok’s slow takeover of Google as the most popular discovery platform. This popularity spike can be traced back to the powerful recommender systems employed by TikTok, where we can see that users are starting to feel that these systems better understand their need for discovery of digitally available content compared to traditional search engines.

By taking into account a variety of factors, such as past behavior, interests, and demographics, AI-powered recommendation systems can offer personalized and accurate recommendations that can help out improve discovery of information by users as well as to further boost services and sales by companies. Here at Shaped we provide an easy-to-use API to help you out in the construction and implementation of these systems.