There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. And then there’s the current AI era where decades of change are happening every single day. It’s astonishing. From search to B2B and B2C, the unrelenting advance of this newly dynamic dimension of digital, especially in advertising, is molding a future we are not quite sure of, except to know that it becomes a more important each moment.
This time last year ChatGPT was a curiosity. Today, 2 million developers are currently building on the ChatGPT API, including the majority of Fortune 500 companies. A legion of open-source alternatives is in close pursuit of the offerings from the nominally more famous players—but the generative AI revolution is happening in smaller places that most marketers aren’t yet aware of, and it’s just barely getting started.
AI has surpassed humans at handwriting, speech, and image recognition. Though there have been some recent hiccups when it comes to some saying that ChatGPT has suddenly got lazier (thereby getting closer and closer to humanizing itself perhaps?), it can pass college entrance tests and coding interview tests. Depending on your definition, or expectation really, human-level machine intelligence is here.
And it’s truly everywhere. The recent reports of AI-generated journalism, along with AI-generated bios and profile pictures, caused a dustup, mostly because they weren’t identified as such. As the future closes in on the present, we should expect more such wrestling with the moral issues.
The most relevant point though isn’t about what the press has reported in general–what is missing from the conversation is the astonishing number of vibrant startups and competition out there. OpenAI is a kind of poster child for the explosion of startups, and everyday new lesser-known but promising entrants step onto the field. It’s not just a battle of giant players by any means, here in the US or even in France where an important community of startups is in full force.
There are now nearly 60,000 AI companies in the world and that number is growing every day. One in four AI companies is based in the U.S., and nearly 115 million companies are actively using AI with almost half of all companies exploring the use of AI. That isn’t considered by most press outlets when it’s easier to talk about the companies we all know.
Again, 60,000 AI companies are at work on the edge of the new frontier and getting to places most of us aren’t paying much attention to. And they could be the “winners” in the new AI world order. Marketers owe it to themselves to get familiar with this new crop of tech.
Here’s another reality check: China has the highest rate of global AI deployment at 58%. Baidu, a massive Chinese multinational company specializing in internet services and products, holds the most AI patents in the world. In fact, China has over 700 million smartphone users who are doing everything on their phones and generating massive amounts of data that feed AI models. That gives Chinese companies that service them, like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, the opportunity to build best-in-class AI systems. The government in Beijing is so convinced of the potential that in July of this year it outlined a development strategy designed to make China the world’s leading AI power by 2030.
As Bedrock Capital’s founder Geoff Lewis put it succinctly on CNBC, “The reality with AI is that if the U.S. does not get there, does not win on AI, the emerging China, Russia, North Korea alliance—they’re going to get there. This is an existential question for the Western world.”
Adding a recent jolt of reasonableness into the conversation about regulation of AI, either in the US or in Europe, is the warning from Marc Andreessen on X, formerly known as Twitter: “The worst idea in the world is a government-protected AI cartel.” That threat comes from the West as well as from the East.
While the West frets, China is innovating, unfettered.
It’s fair to say that authoritarian-backed Chinese-built AI systems could pose far bigger global risks than homegrown ones. China already dominates in exports of AI-powered facial recognition, and that trend is only set to accelerate. They have a global vocational training program that has prepared thousands of AI experts in developing economies around the world. And more than 140 cities across the globe are using Chinese AI technology to turbocharge traffic, logistics and law enforcement.
The recent news on the settlement between Rite Aid and the FTC as a result of the use of facial recognition software is a grim warning: One of the two vendors to Rite Aid that collected personal identification and matched biometrics against things like government-issued driver’s licenses was identified by Reuters in its reporting as DeepCam, which is Chinese-owned and collected massive amounts of data that misidentified shoppers (the other, FaceFirst, is homegrown and based in Austin). Rite Aid disagreed with the accusations but agreed not to use facial recognition software for five years (the settlement is subject to approval by the court overseeing Rite Aid’s bankruptcy proceedings).
The upshot could be an AI future in which the US and EU’s painstaking agreements on safe, rights-respecting AI are rendered obsolete by a world already hardwired with Chinese AI systems—setting de facto authoritarian standards for the technology’s development globally.
If the United States is to truly lead the world in AI, it must not only lead the conversation on its rules and regulation, but also lay the foundations for its dissemination to the world. And that means leading in making AI a key part of everything we do.
For marketers specifically, that means getting educated beyond the biggest players—since much of the AI innovation which will make the future of marketing is bubbling up from players at the edges. The continued competitive nature of AI here in the U.S., plus the very active developments in France and UK, mean that there are more players than just the news cycle covered around CEO jousting at OpenAI.
This is a call to marketers to make AI part of planning, part of execution, and part of the competitive roadmap.
Our future, as an industry and perhaps as Western democracies, depends on it.
