The AI revolution

SCI-TECH

By Aymal Aziz Khan and

Ahmad Hassan Nadeem

A friend used the following prompt on Meta AI to recreate a drawing, named Doda, that she made a while ago: “A girl with bunny ears, one ear has a bow that is red, and her hair is brown. She is wearing a carrot pin, earrings, and an eye patch; she has blue eyes.”

In response to the input, here’s what AI had to offer:

Shocked by the results, what stunned me even more was that this is just the beginning – technologies like generative AI are already blurring boundaries in creativity.

With over 100 million users exploring ChatGPT every week, this AI chatbot has greatly impacted work dynamics across the globe, while also concomitantly revolutionizing a myriad of things that were being performed conventionally.

Coupled with that, generative AI – trained on vast volumes of data – can create new content, like essays or images, thereby having advanced capabilities. This is achieved through Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) which feed on the heaps of data provided to them. NLP, in essence, is a process where a computer is taught to read or understand speech like a human. For instance, OpenAI’s DALL-E technology generates pictures from text inputs from the users. Alexa and Siri, similarly, understand the question you ask and then provide a relevant answer. An LLM is a computer program that understands and generates human language. It is a result of carrying out NLP on large amounts of data.

However, while these may be recent developments in the AI world, they are not entirely new or unfathomable for the general public; I’m pretty certain we all have spent time tinkering with our own Dodas over different chatbots, or tried interrogating ChatGPT about its plans to take over the world.

Further, ChatGPT-4o – which is (partially) free to the users – is the most powerful conversational version of ChatGPT released yet, with even faster response times and the ability to have surprisingly human-like conversation.

Such advancements have prompted people to ask: what does the near future hold?

This leads to a noteworthy aspect of this discussion: the competition between big companies, like Google, OpenAI, and Meta, among others, to create the best AI.

This race could lead to an unprecedented (and probably unchecked) advancement in the field of AI in the years to come, and a symbiotic relationship would emerge between various AI enterprises. It is safe to say that a boom is forthcoming in the tech landscape across the globe in the upcoming years, and an increasing number of businesses and corporations would be driven by these AI technologies.

This begs the question, how has this groundbreaking technology affected Pakistan? A country usually slow to adopt latest technologies must surely be in the dark about it, right? Well, in this case, it seems that our knack for shortcuts has prevailed. Pakistanis have been quick to realize that AI can make a great number of tasks far less daunting. These range from coding assignments in universities, all the way to communication with customers on an app for a certain brand.

To be more specific, many AI tools help eCommerce businesses deploy keywords in their products in order for them to show up in the store easily. This is the art of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and with a concerningly large number of Pakistanis venturing into the realm of eCommerce (a story for another day), AI could not have come at a better time for them. In addition to this, eCommerce stores also utilize artificial intelligence for creating chatbots to handle general queries and provide solutions to simple problems. AI may also aid the business owner in making decisions based on real time data analysis. This could include setting a proper price for the items, giving catchy descriptions, etcetera.

Furthermore, clinics, hospitals, and other healthcare industry counterparts make use of this technological wonder, primarily for sorting out data on patients and keeping inventory in check. Although it is still in its early stages, we hope to see an advanced use of it in the future, with AI possibly diagnosing patients after being told some of the symptoms. This would reduce the need for a large healthcare workforce, directly benefiting rural areas which are devoid of such amenities.

The younger generation has been quicker to acknowledge AI, with many having anxiety over choosing a computer science major at a time like this, while the smarter ones rejoice and use it smartly to do their work more efficiently. In fact, this ‘smart usage’ of AI has altogether given birth to a new field: prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is the art of stringing together an input that will produce an optimal output. Prompt engineering could pave the way for the current and upcoming generations to make AI increasingly efficient, even beyond the levels that it currently is.

The youth today is already accustomed to using AI across different fields, which will inevitably shape the application of these technologies in future industries. The crux of this piece is that AI is no longer a futuristic, utopian concept; rather it is already of paramount importance in our present reality. And although it took us a while to welcome it, we need to realize it is here to stay, and only improve.