Year ender 2023: Some big stories about AI in its breakout year

According to Forbes, AI expenditure in India is expected to reach almost Rs 9,800 crore by 2025 and is expected to contribute at least Rs 3,750 crore to the GDP by 2025. Representational Image

This was the year when artificial intelligence (AI) went from being a nascent technology to invading nearly every aspect of our lives. It's on our phones, our operating systems and you bet big organisations have already started to adopt it into their workflows.

However, we have barely even reached the cusp of AI's potential, let alone scratch it. From popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Copilot to image generators like DALL-E, and of course, the regulatory headaches that come with it, here is a look at some of the biggest stories in AI, in 2023.

India is a vast untapped landscape for AI due to various promising applications in fields like financial services, healthcare, agriculture and a lot more.

According to Forbes, AI expenditure in India is expected to reach almost Rs 9,800 crore by 2025 and is expected to contribute at least Rs 3,750 crore to the GDP by 2025.

That's not all, compared to 2016, India had nearly 14 times more people in June 2023 that have AI on their skill list. AI has already seen heavy adoption across various segments in the country, notably in retail, education and finance.

The government has joined the bandwagon with AI chatbots like MyGov Helpdesk on WhatsApp, Umang's AI chatbot and more initiatives under the Digital Nagrik programmes.

There are more than 60 startups in the country already looking to harness the power of Generative AI and to offer solutions and services across different industry verticals.

ChatGPT wasn't the first of its kind, but it will go down in history as the chatbot that pushed AI into the mainstream. OpenAI's Natural Language chatbot slowly pushed itself into offices, affecting productivity and raising employment fears.

The chatbot hit 100 million+ users in January 2023, just two months after its launch and is one of the most used services ever, generating 1.7 billion website visits in October 2023. It is estimated that the site sees 100 million+ active users every week. The site has an unbelievable bounce rate of just 17.33 percent.

According to Forbes, the popularity of ChatGPT is so huge that Google sees the keyword "chat gpt login" in 6 million searches per month. India (6.32 percent), Japan (4.01 percent) and the United States (15.22 percent) are its biggest audience.

There were a lot of challengers this year gunning for ChatGPT's throne, from Microsoft and Google going all in on new Generative search experiences, to Google's ill-advised Bard launch.

China's Baidu tossed its hat in the ring with Ernie bot, Meta open-sourced LLaMA2 and we also had the French chatbot, Mistral.

Despite the initial hype, none of them ended up posing a significant challenge to ChatGPT. Google's disastrous launch of Bard aside, Microsoft and Google's big Generative AI push in web search received a lukewarm response.

And then there were the goofs, Microsoft's ChatGPT-based Copilot professing its love for a journalist, Google losing $100 billion in value after Bard gave a wrong answer and the meme that is AI Doomerism.

From text-to-image generators spitting out disturbing and copyrighted images, to AI-made deepfakes possibly interfering with elections, 2023 showed us how much or how little we truly know about Generative AI.

Add to that genuine concerns that AI will come for jobs creating an enticing environment for government regulations and guidelines to be established.

The US White House signed an executive order for enhancing AI safety, the European Union passed the AI Act, which will take effect by 2025, and The Digital India Act will have guardrails in place for AI.

We also saw lawsuits and court cases, with concerns over using copyrighted material for AI training, and even a landmark judgement in the UK Supreme Court that ruled that AI-based inventions cannot be granted a patent.

Researchers at the University of Chicago helped develop Nightsahde, a tool meant to protect artists against companies using their work to train AI models.