by Nada Welker | Mar 31, 2023 | Artificial Intelligence, Automotive Industry, Digital Health, Future Trends, Internet of Things, Know-How and inspiration, Market development & Trends, strategy in change
Metaverse is the latest buzzword in the technology industry and hot on everyone’s lips. What’s it all about exactly? Is it a new virtual world, a new reality that is changing the way we live and work, or just a fad that will soon disappear? In this article, we take a closer look at this new technology, its potential applications and its impact on the future.
What is the metaverse?
On October 28, 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta, reflecting the company’s long-term vision to create a shared virtual space that connects people from around the world. But Facebook, as a social media giant, has been doing that for a long time, right? True, but let’s try to dig a little deeper than that.
Imagine being part of a virtual world that looks and feels like the real world. You could explore cities, visit stores, and interact with others whenever you wish. You would be able to attend concerts, watch movies, or play any games you desire. You could even set up your own virtual house, decorate it, and invite friends over. Or you could attend virtual work meetings and conferences without leaving your house. For simplicity, you can think of a metaverse as the next generation of the internet.
Which technologies should be used?
For the metaverse to become a reality, it is important to understand that several new technologies must coexist: Among them, for example, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), head-mounted displays (HMDs), AR Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) to name but a few. Meta has already invested heavily in these technologies, developing hardware such as its Oculus VR headsets, while AR glasses and wristband technologies are also in the works. According to Statista, the market value of such virtual reality and extended reality sets is expected to grow from $31 billion in 2023 to $52 billion in 2027, a remarkable 13.7% compound annual growth rate.
Source: https://www.statista.com/outlook/amo/ar-vr/worldwide#revenue
However, there are other important innovations that can make metaverse a strategic technology trend:
1. Web3: Web3 is a new stack of technologies that enables the development of decentralized web applications. It gives users control over their own identity and data, a feature that is critical to the metaverse.
2. Spatial Computing: This is another important innovation that paves the way for the metaverse. This is a technology that seamlessly connects the physical and digital worlds. This technology allows users to interact with virtual environments in a more natural and intuitive way than has ever been possible before.
3. Digital Twin of a Person (DToP): This is another exciting new innovation that reflects a unique individual and represents a near real-time synchronized multi-presence. This technology enables individuals to be present in multiple places simultaneously, in both digital and physical spaces.
4. Digital Twin of a Customer (DToC): Similar to DToP, DToC is a dynamic virtual image of a customer that simulates behavior and learns to emulate and anticipate it. This technology enables the creation of highly personalized experiences in the metaverse, where customers can be individuals, personas, groups of people, or even machines.
Who will own the metaverse?
While Facebook’s recent rebranding as Meta and announcement of significant investment in building the metaverse has certainly brought this concept to the forefront, other tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Amazon have also expressed interest in exploring the potential of the metaverse. In addition, smaller startups and gaming companies are also working to develop metaverse platforms. What we do know is that Meta, as an individual company, will not own the metaverse. What the ownership and management of the metaverse will look like in the future is a completely open book.
What opportunities does the metaverse offer for the automotive industry?
It’s easy to imagine the metaverse taking hold in the gaming and entertainment industries. What’s more exciting is, it also has the potential to go beyond these sectors and revolutionize the automotive industry.
One of the key areas where the metaverse could have a significant impact is in the development and testing of autonomous vehicles. The ability to create a virtual world where autonomous vehicles can be tested in a number of different scenarios would save a lot of time and resources compared to physical testing. The metaverse can also provide a virtual environment to speed up the prototyping process when developing a vehicle and use digital twins to optimize production processes. BMW’s virtual factory, for example, uses NVIDIA’s Omniverse software to create digital twins for each vehicle produced. Other OEMs, such as Hyundai, have also partnered with Unity, a game development platform, to build a meta-factory, which is a digital twin of the company’s physical factory supported by a metaverse platform.
In addition, the metaverse could be used to provide customers with a more immersive experience when purchasing a vehicle. According to a recent McKinsey and Co. survey, customers in the United States visited an average of only two showrooms before purchasing a vehicle, down from five in 2007. This trend could be leveraged to create a virtual showroom where customers can interact with different models and even customize their vehicles to their own specifications. This could revolutionize the car-buying experience, making it more appealing and personalized for consumers. Although a customer will always want to see the actual car in person before buying, this technology has the opportunity to reinvent car dealerships.
Revolutionizing the Automotive Industry and Transforming the Future
In summary, the metaverse will revolutionize the internet as we know it – including the automotive industry. Its impact will be felt in many ways, from development to manufacturing and distribution to customer services. Industry players who embrace the metaverse and use its capabilities to develop innovative products and services will undoubtedly have a competitive advantage over those who lag behind in its adaptation. The metaverse will create new revenue streams, transform the customer experience and enable new business models that were previously unimaginable. As we move toward a future where technology blurs the lines between the physical and digital worlds, the metaverse will play an increasingly central role in shaping the way we interact with each other. The question is not whether the metaverse will change the world, but rather how quickly and effectively industry players will adapt and embrace this new reality. The future is exciting, and the metaverse is undoubtedly one of the key drivers that will shape it.
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by Nada Welker | Mar 14, 2023 | Artificial Intelligence, Future Trends, Internet of Things, Market development & Trends
No other topic is currently keeping the AI world as busy as ChatGPT, the chatbot released in November. ChatGPT was developed by AI startup OpenAI and already reached 1 million users within 5 days. This was not even achieved by music streaming service Spotify and social network Instagram. What is behind the chatbot’s technology and what opportunities and challenges does it present? Magility provides an overview.
A promising multi-talent?
ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 language model, and its extension with a dialog format allows it to respond to a wide range of human queries and tasks. Thus, the chatbot can answer questions on arbitrary topics, write different types of texts such as essays or poems, and even output lines of code. Unlike previous chatbots, ChatGPT can also recognize contexts of user queries and thus respond to follow-up questions, which could be a breakthrough for customer service automation in particular.
Using ChatGPT is simple: All you need is an OpenAI account and you can start chatting. For example, you can ask the chatbot “What is the highest mountain in the world?”. The bot will most likely answer “Mount Everest” and you can finally ask “What was the name of the first climber of this mountain?”. In doing so, the chatbot will know that the question refers to the previous input and that the mountain means Mount Everest. If you are not satisfied with the bot’s answer, you can use the “Regenerate response” button to generate an alternative answer.
ChatGPT learns with the help of human feedback
The AI behind ChatGPT has been fed with a huge amount of data that currently extends to the end of 2021. Based on this data, the bot generates suitable and natural answers to user queries. But the chatbot’s answers are only as good as the data or the questions themselves. For example, if the data has knowledge gaps or is biased, these weaknesses may also show up in the bot’s answers. For this reason, OpenAI relies, among other things, on so-called “reinforcement learning from human feedback” to train the bot. In this method, humans first respond to various user inputs. Then the AI itself answers user input and generates several answer options per input. These answers are in turn rated by humans and ranked from best to worst. ChatGPT ultimately uses this feedback to optimize its responses. Users can also provide feedback to the bot while chatting by pressing either the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button and optionally providing their ideal answer in a comment window and pointing out possible inappropriate answers.
Wide range of applications of ChatGPT
With its ability to understand and generate natural language, numerous opportunities open up for both companies and private individuals to use the bot, as ChatGPT has been publicly available to date. Companies can use the chatbot in human resources, for example, to automate internal processes and have documents such as contracts or job descriptions written. In customer service, on the other hand, the chatbot could be trained to respond to follow-up questions from customers and provide more flexible answers based on existing chat histories with customers. Furthermore, ChatGPT holds great potential for content creation in areas such as marketing, journalism and public relations. In this context, ChatGPT can not only speed up content creation, but also improve its quality. Finally, the code community could also benefit from the bot in the future. ChatGPT can help programmers find errors in their code or suggest improvements.
Chatbot makes misinformation sound plausible
But the bot is not yet fully developed. The coding platform Stack Overflow has now even banned the use of this bot. ChatGPT does not generate any expertise, but rather invents facts. Instead of pointing out missing data, the AI can generate a confident but questionable and ultimately incorrect answer based on insufficient knowledge, which can lead to misinformation. For example, in response to a question, the chatbot may have invented a study and its results, which never existed. The user would not notice this because the answer sounds plausible. Automatically generated texts must therefore be checked for accuracy by the user.
The ChatGPT developer OpenAI itself even warns about its chatbot:
„it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.“ (OpenAI-CEO Sam Altman on Twitter)
Countermovement: GTPZero aims to expose machine-generated content
Schools and universities are also concerned that the chatbot could encourage poor writing skills and plagiarism on the part of students if ChatGPT is increasingly relied upon to complete school assignments and homework. The latter is to be countered by AI recognition software programs that were developed immediately after the release of ChatGPT and are currently being tested. An American computer science student has developed GPTZero, an application that should be able to quickly and effectively determine whether a text was written by a human or an AI. While machine-generated texts tend to have more uniform and constant complexity and rarely have typos, humans, on the other hand, tend to have more variation and more typos in their sentences. The application examines texts according to these patterns.
The Office of Technology Assessment at the Bundestag long ago called for labeling for machine-generated texts. OpenAI, meanwhile, announced that it will watermark texts generated by ChatGPT to prevent plagiarism.
Microsoft integrates bot into search engine
While the online world is hotly debating the chatbot, Microsoft has now linked an advanced version of ChatGPT to its Bing search engine. However, the chatbot had to be put on a leash again shortly after its release, after it became abusive towards users on several occasions. Soon, Microsoft also plans to integrate AI into Office apps like Word and PowerPoint. The software giant had already invested $1 billion in chat GPT developer OpenAI in 2019. Now Microsoft has announced that it will invest another 10 billion in the company and is challenging Google for the top position in search engines.
Tech groups go on the offensive
But the rapid rise of ChatGPT has not left tech companies Google and Meta untouched. Both companies are working flat out on a competing AI. Google had been hesitant to publicly demonstrate its own LaMDA language model until now. Now, a few weeks ago, the company presented the chatbot Bard, which is based on LaMDA, and inadvertently revealed the bot’s first weaknesses. It turned out that the bot answered the question about interesting discoveries of the James Webb telescope in a Google commercial with a wrong statement, which Nasa confirmed afterwards. Meta has also announced its intention to launch its own language model Llama. But the blunders by Google and Microsoft show that the development of chatbots still has a long way to go before reliable and harmless interaction is possible.
ChatGPT has already changed the online world for good
Although ChatGPT still has major weaknesses, the immense potential of the chatbot is undisputed. There are already many possible uses for the bot, and the release of ChatGPT has once again enormously accelerated the development of AI-based language models.
And the development remains rapid, because the release of GPT-4 has already been announced for next week. The new version of the chatbot will then be able to generate videos from text, according to Andreas Braun, CTO of Microsoft Germany.
Can ChatGPT stay at the top? Or will the AI soon be surpassed by competing language models? And how would the future planned regulation of AI systems affect the use of chatbots?
We at magility are excited about further developments in the field of artificial intelligence, are diligently testing ChatGPT and other AI-based technologies, and are happy to keep our customers and blog readers up to date.
What are your thoughts on the use of ChatGPT? Feel free to contact our experts at magility for an exchange on the topic of chatbots and AI-based applications or follow us on LinkedIn and stay up-to-date.
[infobox headline=”At a glance”]
- ChatGPT generates natural-sounding responses to user input and can recognize connections between requests.
- The AI behind the bot is trained using human feedback, which rates the generated responses from good to bad, optimizing the quality of the responses.
- Future application areas for ChatGPT could include customer service, human resources, search engines, and content creation.
- US student develops AI recognition software GTPZero in response to ChatGPT to unmask machine-generated text and curb plagiarism.
- Microsoft invests billions in ChatGPT developer OpenAI and integrates a modified version of the bot into its Bing search engine. Google and Meta counter with their own language models.
- Chatbots still have major weaknesses: Incomplete data leads to the generation of false facts and encroaching behavior of the AI.
[/infobox]
