Humanity is at the breaking point of technological change. Exascale supercomputers perform exascale calculations per second. The number of crystal structures discovered by AI is more than 45 times that found in the history of science. Potential new anti-cancer drugs were developed in just 30 days. Uruguay There are more industrial robots than people...
Bank of America pointed out in an in-depth report on March 21 that 2024 will be the year when "AI empowers everything" and there will be a huge positive feedback between AI and other technological developments, including artificial intelligence, computing, robots, and communications. 30 technical fields such as , medical care, and energy may usher in breakthroughs.
The commercialization of breakthrough technologies is critical, and Bank of America estimates the relevant market size to be approximately US$16 trillion.
Historically, technological progress has led to the concentration of wealth and rapid corporate turnover. In the past 100 years, 3% of companies have created almost all the world’s net wealth; since 2015, about one-third of the S&P 500 constituent stocks have been replaced. Technology accelerates market change and disruption.
The AI technological revolution kicked off last year and is driving the accelerated development of all walks of life. The future will depend more on the implementation and application of AI models. Bank of America pointed out end-side AI equipment, enhanced simulation, knowledge graphs, supercomputing (HDC ), general artificial intelligence (AGI) and other five major landing directions.
AI "takes over" everything and develops to form "positive feedback"
Bank of America pointed out that the development of artificial intelligence is at a turning point, and it is changing various industries at an exponential rate. The future development of AI will depend on the following three factors:
1. Technology “crossover”: the mutual promotion between different technologies, such as AI promoting the development of computing and communication technologies;
2. Technology “scarcity”: In a world where the demand for technology exceeds supply, the demand for computing power is growing faster than the prediction of Moore’s Law, and the scarcity of data and computing power will become a challenge;
3. Technology "economy": Technology itself develops towards lower costs and higher returns.
Looking further, Bank of America believes that 2024 will be the year when "AI empowers everything", and there will be a huge positive feedback between AI and other technological developments.
AI connects and empowers technology, business and society, driving the development of technological singularity. In this process, the development of computing, communications and technology has brought impetus to the AI revolution, which in turn has formed a positive feedback loop, providing more computing power, communication resources and data, further accelerating AI progress.
Bank of America also talked about the importance of computing power. There is so much data, but computing power cannot keep up with the corresponding growth.
Demand for computing power is growing faster than Moore's Law predicts, growing 275 times every two years.
We are about to move from generating exabytes of data every day to millions of six bytes, and more than 80% of new capacity in renewable energy will also require new infrastructure and materials that are in short supply.
In addition, Bank of America also mentioned that costs will be further reduced in the future, and all investments in automation, artificial intelligence, and technology are reducing prices and improving returns across the board. For example, even though the capacity of memory drives has increased more than 20,000 times in the past 20 years, the price per gigabyte has dropped by more than 99%.
Five major application areas for AI implementation
Last year was the "year of AI", and the AI revolution will accelerate from the beginning. In 2023, we have witnessed a surge in investment in generative AI. Since the release of ChatGPT, various closed source and open source models have been introduced, and companies have begun to develop, adopt or AI is integrated into the product or business.
Bank of America noted that the pace of innovation will accelerate from here, and more AI tools and applications may be launched soon. This could lead to rich opportunities beyond the digital realm into the physical realm of end devices, robotics and life sciences.
1. Device-side AI devices: Deploying AI functions/models on local devices (such as smartphones, cars, wearable devices) helps reduce delays and costs, helps share the power load of large servers, and improves the entire AI ecosystem. system performance.
2. Enhanced simulation: AI is used to accelerate the discovery process, identify the most feasible simulations, accelerate the creation of new molecules, and reduce costs. What would take 10 years to complete in the physical world can now be completed in weeks to months. tasks, application areas include drug discovery, chips, chemicals, and materials.
3. Knowledge graph: Knowledge graph organizes data from multiple sources, captures information about topics of interest, and establishes connections between them. They are key to solving the LLM "illusion" problem (i.e. providing inaccurate information with a high degree of confidence) and improving the capabilities of neural networks. Data professionals in most organizations typically spend 25-30% of their time finding and searching for relevant data.
4. Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC): HDC uses high-dimensional vectors to represent information instead of traditional binary systems. It can capture more complex data patterns and allow computers to retain more memory, thereby reducing computing and energy requirements. HDC can achieve energy savings of more than 60% compared to the technology used in today's chips.
5. General artificial intelligence (AGI): As an artificial assistant, AGI will have general cognitive abilities that reach or exceed human levels on a wide range of tasks, can achieve self-learning, and can solve tasks that have not been pre-programmed. With the growth of data, improvement of computing power and technological innovation, AI may reach an IQ of 1,500 in the next ten years, which is 18 times the average human IQ.
Bank of America added that although AI brings many benefits, there are also challenges, such as power consumption, cost, algorithm/software optimization and security issues for end-side device AI. Overall, the Bank of America report predicts that AI may add about 15% to 20% of global economic value by 2030.