It's important to note that despite the recent excitement about LLMs, which is still an emerging technology, "AI" is not a new market by any means, nor are major companies only now investing in it. For the better part of a decade, ML has been widely adopted across industries, and the average person uses an "AI" system many times in a given day.
For example, if you open the home screen on the average smartphone right now, you'll see apps like:
- Delivery apps like Uber, Lyft, etc., whose recommendations, ETA predictions, driver matching, and more are built on ML.
- Media apps like YouTube, Netflix, etc., all of whom rely on models for recommendations.
- Email apps like Gmail, whose filtering (both spam and categorization) and text completion are based on ML.
- Photo apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and even your phone's basic Camera app, all of which use computer vision.
If you Google anything, you're perusing the output of a model. If you're being recommended something on basically any platform, you're interacting with ML. If you ever use speech-to-text, you're using a neural network. Your bank uses ML for fraud detection, your posts on social media are moderated by ML-based content moderation, and if you have a car with any recent-ish sort of lane departure assistance, you're driving with help from a neural network.
Most of these companies have large, mature ML teams, whose outputs represent massive amounts of revenue. Hence, they represent a legitimate market for selling picks and shovels.
