Gather round, grab some hot chocolate, and let’s see what the experts think is about to happen next in the world of AI: Natalie Monbiot, Head of Strategy at Hour One: Max Versace, CEO and co-founder of Neurala: 2022 will see the growth of a new hybrid workforce in which human employees share their workload with digital employees. They will offload repetitive or routine tasks to machines that can perform them just as well, and in some cases better. What’s more, employees will have their own digital avatars, with superhuman skills – such as the ability to speak any language. This will serve to break down geographical and cultural barriers and enable a whole new era of frictionless communications. The new augmented, hybrid workforce will become pervasive thanks to advances in AI video production, and the sheer portability of video. This will play well with asynchronous communication, which is proven to be the most effective medium for the remote working environment. Andy Hock, Head of Product at Cerebras Systems: Let the clouds be in the sky: AI will accelerate its migration from servers to edges. Where data lives needs to be interpreted (often in real-time) and should not leave the walls of the company. Today, a plethora of AI-ready processors, cameras, and other hardware makes this possible. Increasingly, companies are realizing that the way to build a truly efficient AI algorithm is to train it on their own unique data, which might vary substantially over time. To do that effectively, the intelligence needs to directly interface with the sensors producing the data. From there, AI should run at a compute edge, and interface with cloud infrastructure only occasionally for backups and/or increased functionality. No critical process – e.g., in a manufacturing plant – would and should exclusively rely on cloud AI, exposing the manufacturing floor to connectivity/latency issues that could disrupt production. 2022 will see edge learning technologies on the rise, enabling AI to ‘reprogram’ from scratch in a few seconds, whenever and wherever needed. This paradigm-shifting technology will empower AI to truly serve its purpose at speeds, latency, and costs that make it affordable for every user. Yashar Behzadi, CEO and founder of Synthesis AI: In terms of AI models and use cases, we anticipate a continued expansion and use of large language models for text and other sequence data modeling problems, with increased attention being paid to more parameter- and data-efficient models and methods. In computer vision, we will see increased use of high-resolution 2D and 3D image datasets and video, which will lead to greater demand for purpose-built AI compute platforms with greater performance and efficiency at scale. We also expect to see continued development and greater adoption of graph neural networks for industry applications ranging from drug discovery to finance to social network analysis. Michael Krause, Senior Manager of AI Solutions at Beyond Limits: Synthetic Data Will Be a Requirement to Build the Metaverse: The metaverse cannot be built without the use of synthetic data. To recreate reality as a digital twin, it’s necessary to deeply understand humans, objects, 3D environments, and their interactions with one another. Creating these AI capabilities requires tremendous amounts of high-quality labeled 3D data––data that is impossible for humans to label. We are incapable of labeling distance in 3D space, inferring material properties or labeling light sources needed to recreate spaces in high-fidelity. Synthetic data built using a combination of generative AI models and visual effects (VFX) technologies will be a key enabler of the AI models required to power new metaverse applications. Kim Duffy, Senior Life Science Product Manager at Vicon: Here’s hoping your holidays are great and 2022 is your best year ever! We’ll be here to bring you all the news, analysis, and opinion you’ve come to expect from the Neural team. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s predictions here and, as always, time-travelers can check out next year’s at their convenience.
