Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) is transforming the very way in which we understand technology and its potential to change our lives. Unlike the conventional applications of AI, which focus on automation and data analysis, Generative AI is all about creation. From designing new drugs to composing music, this technology is pushing the boundaries of what is possible, taking us into a future where our imagination is the only limitation.

The rapid growth of Generative AI can be compared to the rise of social media in the last decade. Just as platforms such as Facebook and Twitter revolutionized the way we communicate and share information, Generative AI is changing the way we solve problems and create new solutions. Since its inception, the technology has been advancing at a remarkable pace. In March 2023 alone, six major milestones were recorded, including new solutions for customer relationship management and support for the financial industry.

Milestones in the evolution of Generative AI

Generative AI has undergone a fascinating evolution marked by a series of noteworthy milestones which, according to McKinsey are as follows:

1. 30 November 2022: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, powered by GPT 3.5, becomes the first widely used text generator product, reaching a record 100 million users in 2 months.
2. 12 December 2022: Cohere launches the first LLM to support 100+ languages, available on its enterprise AI platform.
3. 26 December 2022: LLMs, including Google’s Med-PaLM, are trained for specific use cases and domains, such as clinical knowledge.
4. 2 February 2023: Amazon’s multimodal-CoT model incorporates “chain-of-thought prompting,” outperforming GPT 3.5 on several metrics.
5. 24 February 2023: Meta’s LLaMA, a smaller model, continues to be more efficient and competitive for some tasks compared to other models.
6. 27 February 2023: Microsoft introduces Kosmos-1, a multimodal LLM that responds to image and audio stimuli in addition to natural language.
7. 7 March 2023: Salesforce announces Einstein GPT, the first Generative AI technology for Customer Relationship Management.
8. 13 March 2023: OpenAI launches GPT 4, with significant improvements in accuracy and hallucination mitigation.
9. 14 March 2023: Anthropic introduces Claude, an AI assistant trained to reduce the likelihood of harmful outcomes.
10. 16 March 2023: Microsoft integrates GPT 4 into its Office 365 suite, boosting productivity.
11. 21 March 2023: Google launches Bard, an AI chatbot based on the LaMDA family of LLMs.
12. 30 March 2023: Bloomberg announces an LLM trained on financial data for natural language tasks in the financial industry.
13. 13 April 2023: Amazon announces Bedrock, the first fully managed service offering models via multi-vendor APIs.

Generative AI is here to stay, and its rapid development hints at the ever-greater influence of this technology on our daily lives.