Mint DIS 2023 | World at dawn of 'intelligence economy': Umakant Soni

The world is at the "cusp of the dawn of the intelligence economy," Umakant Soni, general partner, ART Venture fund, cofounder ARTPARK, and chairman of AI foundry said. Soni spoke at the Mint Digital Innovation Summit 2023, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of this new world.

He said that the year 1975 was the peak of the industrial economy where billions of places and regions were connected by road, rail, and flight. It was followed by the knowledge digital economy in 2009 where billions of people were connected to the internet.  “By 2030, we're going have seven half billion people connected with 30 billion-plus intelligent machines. And that is going to be what we call a thriving intelligence economy.”

Further, speaking in the context of ChatGPT and other smart chatbots, Soni said that this domain too has undergone different phases of evolution. From the ‘first wave’ where developers handcrafted machine learning systems to generate responses, to the ‘second wave’ where chatbots became smarter but still needed structured data and a good data pipeline for application in areas like healthcare and logistics. 

“All changed with the ‘third wave’ powered by large language models,” he said. Tools like ChatGPT today can work with unstructured data to predict what comes next, Soni added. As per him, today, if ChatGPT is predicting the next word, an evolved model will be able to predict the next image or even the next video sequence; soon, we will not just be dealing with unstructured data, but also the unstructured environment.

“We are going to see multiple industries getting disrupted in the next ten years. Fundamentally, for the first time in our human history, we will have a planet-scale intelligence,” said Soni. He predicts there are four major emerging focus areas to which artificial intelligence and robotics would be applied to. This includes – a rapidly aging world, climate change, accelerated discovery, and eventually building a society 4.0 that matches up to evolving technology and industry landscape.