“Worldwide interest in technology” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Alexander Levi talks about the success of IT giants in developing AI in 2023.

If hearing the word “ChatGPT” makes you feel a little queasy, then you’re fine. In the English version of Wikipedia, this is the most popular query in 2023. The page had 49.4 million hits at the end of November, the Wikimedia Foundation said.

In Russia, according to Yandex, the top ten most popular searches in the “Technology and Science” section contain three related queries: “artificial intelligence”, “neural networks”, “machine learning”.

Russian IT giants Sber and Yandex presented a number of tools in this area. From the latest in 2023: Sber, for example, opened early access to the GigaCode service. This is a personal developer assistant who, in real time, creates the most likely continuations of a code fragment directly in the development environment.

And the YandexGPT 2 neural network model was ahead of the popular version GPT 3.5 in terms of the quality of answers in Russian. What’s even more pleasant is that Yandex is included in the list of world leaders in AI development. The list was compiled by Epoch AI and the MIT Institute. According to the authors of the rating, the greatest contribution to the development of artificial intelligence was made by Google and OpenAI.

Interest in the technology is worldwide, so it is not surprising that Russians have become three times more active in using neural networks. According to Yota researchers, the most popular was the Masterpiece neural network. Second place goes to Kandinsky, and Mubert closes the top three among domestic users. The latter, by the way, appeared almost eight years ago, and a couple of years ago I already talked about this service.

The main users of neural networks in Russia are people aged from 26 to 35 and from 36 to 45 years. These two age groups account for two-thirds of the traffic, which they share almost equally. But the highest dynamics are observed among zoomers. In 2023, their number increased 11 times.

The popularity and influence of generative neural networks have become so high that, in fact, in the first year of their active presence we have already experienced serious and mysterious scandal with CEO of ChatGPT developer Sam Altman.

Given the speed of technology development, there is every chance of new disruptions in 2024, for example, with Midjourney. Its alpha version v6, which produces stunning images, appears to have been trained on movies, games, and other potentially infringing content.