The machines come for your harvest – at least in some fields in America. This fall, John Deere, a tractor manufacturer, delivered its first fleet of fully self-propelled machines to farmers. The farm tractors are equipped with six cameras that use artificial intelligence (ai) to detect obstacles and avoid them. Julian Sanchez, who heads the company’s emerging technologies division, estimates that about half of the vehicles John Deere sells have AI capabilities. These include systems that use onboard cameras to detect weeds between crops and then spray herbicide, and combines that automatically change their own settings to minimize wasted grain. Mr. Sanchez says the additional cost of buying an AI-enhanced tractor will pay for itself in two to three years for a medium-sized farm.
The machines come for your harvest – at least in some fields in America. This fall, John Deere, a tractor manufacturer, delivered its first fleet of fully self-propelled machines to farmers. The farm tractors are equipped with six cameras that use artificial intelligence (ai) to detect obstacles and avoid them. Julian Sanchez, who heads the company’s emerging technologies division, estimates that about half of the vehicles John Deere sells have AI capabilities. These include systems that use onboard cameras to detect weeds between crops and then spray herbicide, and combines that automatically change their own settings to minimize wasted grain. Mr. Sanchez says the additional cost of buying an AI-enhanced tractor will pay for itself in two to three years for a medium-sized farm.
For decades, bright-eyed technologists have been claiming that AI will disrupt the business world and create tremendous benefits for businesses and customers. John Deere isn’t the only evidence that this is finally happening. A survey by consulting firm McKinsey found that this year 50% of companies around the world had attempted to use AI in some way, up from 20% in 2017. Powerful new “foundation” models are moving quickly from the lab to the real world chatgpt , a new AI tool recently released for public testing, is making waves for its ability to crack clever jokes and explain scientific concepts. But the excitement is also palpable among enterprise users of AI, their developers, and those developers’ businesses -funders. Many of them attended a week-long jamboree hosted by Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud computing arm, in Las Vegas. The event, which ended on December 2nd, was packed with lectures and workshops on AI. The busiest booths in the exhibition hall were those of AI companies such as Dataiku and Blackbook.ai.
For decades, bright-eyed technologists have been claiming that AI will disrupt the business world and create tremendous benefits for businesses and customers. John Deere isn’t the only evidence that this is finally happening. A survey by consulting firm McKinsey found that this year 50% of companies around the world had attempted to use AI in some way, up from 20% in 2017. Powerful new “foundation” models are moving quickly from the lab to the real world chatgpt , a new AI tool recently released for public testing, is making waves for its ability to crack clever jokes and explain scientific concepts. But the excitement is also palpable among enterprise users of AI, their developers, and those developers’ businesses -funders. Many of them attended a week-long jamboree hosted by Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud computing arm, in Las Vegas. The event, which ended on December 2nd, was packed with lectures and workshops on AI. The busiest booths in the exhibition hall were those of AI companies such as Dataiku and Blackbook.ai.
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The vibrant AI scene is an exception to the downbeat mood in the tech world, which is in the midst of a deep slump. According to PitchBook, a data company, in 2022 venture capitalists will have invested $67 billion in companies claiming to specialize in AI. The share of VC deals worldwide involving such startups has increased to 15% this quarter since mid-2021 (see Chart 1). Between January and October, 28 new AI unicorns (private startups worth $1B or more) were minted. Microsoft is said to be in talks to increase its stake in OpenAI, an incubation model builder and chatgpt provider. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is reportedly planning to invest $200 million in Cohere, a rival of OpenAI. At least 22 AI startups have been founded by alumni of OpenAI and Deepmind, one of Alphabet’s AI labs, according to a report by Ian Hogarth and Nathan Benaich, two British entrepreneurs.
(The Economist) Click on the image to enlarge it
The exuberance is not limited to Silicon Valley. Big companies of all kinds are desperate for AI talent. According to PitchBook, major American companies in the S&P 500 index have acquired 52 AI startups in the past 12 months, compared to 24 purchases in 2017. PredictLeads, another data provider, notes that the same group of companies in the three months to November published around 7,000 job advertisements for AI and machine learning experts per month, around ten times more than in the first quarter of 2020 (see chart 2). . Derek Zanutto of CapitalG, one of Alphabet’s VC divisions, notes that large companies have spent years collecting data and investing in related technology. They now want to use this “data stack” to their advantage. AI offers possibilities for this.
(The Economist) Click on the image to enlarge it
Not surprisingly, the technology industry was the first industry to use AI. From the 2000s, machine learning techniques helped Google improve its online advertising business. Now it’s using Ai to improve search results, finish your sentences in Gmail, and explore ways to reduce energy use in its data centers, among other things. Amazon’s AI manages its supply chains, directs warehouse robots and predicts which applicants will be good workers; Apple is powering its digital assistant Siri; Meta’s offers attention-grabbing social media posts; and Microsoft is doing everything from removing background noise in Teams, its video conferencing service, to letting users create initial drafts of PowerPoint presentations.
Big Tech quickly spotted an opportunity to sell some of these AI capabilities to customers. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all now offer such tools for customers of their cloud computing divisions. Revenue from Microsoft’s machine learning cloud service has doubled year over year in each of the past four quarters. From Avidbots, a Canadian developer of robots that sweep warehouse floors, to Gong, whose app helps sales teams follow up on a lead, emerging vendors have proliferated. Greater use of cloud computing, which lowers the cost of deploying AI, allowed the technology to spread to other sectors, from manufacturing to insurance. You may not see it, but these days AI is everywhere.
