The big tech AI race has blazed all through 2023. What will 2024 bring?

Even without talking about OpenAI’s dramatic firing and rehiring of Sam Altman (replacing two women on OpenAI’s board), the big tech Artificial Intelligence (AI) race has been blazing steadily throughout 2023, with the year ending in generated AI reaching heights never seen before.

The AI race hasn’t abated at all. This year, big tech companies like Google, Apple, OpenAI, Microsoft and AWS, have been vying to announce technologies better than each other. On the second day of Amazon’s AWS re:Invent, CEO Adam Selipsky reinvented almost all the innovations of OpenAI and Microsoft combined.

Read more: The big tech race for the better LLM is on high speed, steady now

Right after OpenAI’s Q* came out, AWS announced Q, a chatbot for AWS customers. AWS users can set Q up by integrating and customizing it with apps and software, such as Salesforce, Jira, Zendesk, Gmail, and Amazon S3 storage instances.

Experts are saying that all the features of Q sound similar to ChatGPT Enterprise or Microsoft’s Copilot Studio.

In September, Amazon agreed to invest up to US$4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, as the e-commerce giant vies with Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia. The move will give Amazon access to Anthropic’s powerful AI language model Claude 2.

AWS believes that generative AI represents a major technological shift to transform the way its customers build, and we are beyond excited to be a part of that larger vision

AWS also acquired YC grad Fig for an undisclosed amount in its push toward generative AI, only three years after the company’s launch. “AWS believes that generative AI represents a major technological shift to transform the way its customers build, and we are beyond excited to be a part of that larger vision,” the company says. Fig, a command line interface (CLI), raised a US$2.2M seed round in 2021.

In December, Google revealed its plan for a tie up with the National eGovernance Division to integrate the Files app with the Indian government’s Digilocker service, while enhancing the security features of Google Pay.

In addition, according to reports, Google DeepMind is training Gemini, its next version of the generative AI model which it claims will be multimodal, on video transcripts of YouTube, not just the audio. This would make the model rich and heavily informed. Something no one has done before. Also, Google DeepMind launched an AI watermark tool that labels images generated by AI. Google Bard can now tap directly into Gmail and Docs.

ChatGPT-4 opened for business in August. It offers enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access, longer context windows for processing longer inputs, advanced data analysis capabilities, and customization options.

In July, Microsoft Teams introduced AI-powered makeup filters by Maybelline.

The release of ChatGPT Voice Assistant, with its ability for open-ended dialogues, has overshadowed Apple’s Siri. In fact, some are calling OpenAI the new Apple.

Reports say that many iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max users are now opting for the Action button as a ChatGPT shortcut. On the other hand, other iPhone users who wish to integrate ChatGPT with Siri are frustrated.

Apple is making an attempt though. For its upcoming iOS 18, it plans to incorporate generative AI to let Siri answer questions. Apple is also reportedly planning generative AI for apps like Apple Music, Pages, Keynote, and Xcode. 

What if Apple and OpenAI got together? We could see some more unprecedented tech.

The AI game has become unpredictable in more ways than we know. Here’s hoping that more good than evil will come out of this race.