In his book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, MIT physicist Max Tegmark said that AI progress is “the most important conversation of our time.” Advances in AI will impact nearly every aspect of our lives within decades, he argued, citing experts. Although this seems like a distant prospect for now, we’ll witness some exciting shifts in this domain, stimulated by AI trends throughout 2022.
According to projections from the consulting firm Gartner, the worldwide AI software market will hit $62bn in 2022, representing an increase of 21.3% from 2021. The firm expects business interest in AI to be among the main drivers of market growth. Approximately 48% of tech executives polled by Gartner said they had already deployed AI or machine learning (ML) technologies or planned to deploy it the following year. Over 87% of respondents who invested in AI believed that funding for the technology would increase across industries at a moderate to fast pace through 2022.
AI market forecasts like these and our experience in developing AI-powered solutions allow us to predict what will generate buzz in the industry over the next 12 months. Let’s take a look at the top five AI trends for 2022 prompted by significant advances in the following domains:
Computer vision technology is set to be one of the most talked about AI trends in 2022.
In a Gartner survey, respondents whose organizations invest in AI reported that computer vision would be their highest planned investment in 2022. The funding allocated by each of the companies over the next two years is expected to average $679,000.
Computer vision is a form of AI that attempts to replicate human visual recognition abilities with the help of ML algorithms. Models are trained to spot patterns in images they analyze and eventually become capable of identifying and classifying objects.
The technology has a wide range of applications across industries — healthcare (helping doctors detect pathologies in X-ray, CT, and MRI scans), retail (scanning inventory in warehouses), manufacturing (visual inspection of equipment), output quality management at plants (scanning products for defects), agriculture and farming (monitoring state of fields and farms with computer-vision-powered drones), autonomous vehicles, and more. The latter deserves a separate section in our list of AI trends for 2022.
The global autonomous vehicle market is projected to be worth $146.4bn in 2022, up from $105.7bn in 2021, according to Statista’s projections. Even though the total vehicle market penetration of driverless cars is expected to remain low, more and more car manufacturers continue to join the fray.
Tesla, Uber, Google, Ford, GM, Aurora, and Cruise are just some of the companies already testing self-driving technology enabled by computer vision and are ready to scale within the next 12 months.
In August 2021, Tesla introduced its new powerful chip, Dojo, designed specifically to process massive amounts of images received from computer vision systems in its self-driving cars. The company claimed it was the fastest AI training chip ever known. Boosting self-driving technology viability will accelerate Tesla’s progress in taking autonomous vehicles to the road on a large scale. Earlier, the company promised its cars would demonstrate full self-driving capacity by 2022.
Around that time, Google’s subsidiary company for autonomous driving, Waymo, expanded its self-driving taxi service outside of Arizona for the first time since it began operating in 2017. Waymo robotaxis are now available in the San Francisco and New York areas. This is a big step forward for the company and self-driving technology overall, since roads in San Francisco are much harder to navigate than those in Phoenix, Arizona.
In China, Beijing’s local authorities allowed Baidu’s Apollo Go robotaxi to charge for the service in certain districts of the capital city, taking self-driving to a new level in China. Baidu’s management hopes that other major cities like Shanghai will follow suit early in 2022.
Another of the AI trends to look out for in 2022 is the increased intelligence of chatbots and virtual assistants. This will be particularly noticeable as digital workplace experiences establish a foothold across industries amid global uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Deep learning and natural language processing technologies enable chatbots and virtual assistants to help businesses automate routine tasks that humans normally do. They are known for their simplistic communication style and standard responses. However, as AI matures and technological advances continue, we are likely to see more intelligent chatbots in 2022.
Virtual assistant developers continuously add new features to the skill set of digital employees, like Amelia, for example, teaching them to perform more complex conversational tasks. The company, also named Amelia, claims a 91% of customer satisfaction rate for its virtual assistant, which is comparable to the rate for human assistants.
Graphics chip producer NVIDIA is rolling out a platform that generates interactive AI avatars. It’s called NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar. The underlying technology used in avatar development includes computer vision, speech AI, natural language processing, simulation technologies, and recommendation engines. The company says their AI assistants will be able to perform billions of routine customer service actions, such as help with banking transactions, take restaurant orders, and schedule personal appointments.
The US financial services giant Wells Fargo announced that within the next 12 months, its new fully AI-powered assistant, Fargo, would help convert more customers into digital users. The company claims Fargo will be able to deal with money transfers, bill paying, transaction information details, and budgeting advice.
Tech giants such as Amazon Lex, Nuance, and IBM are also working on improving their virtual agent technology.
Virtual assistants and AI agents will be quite handy as we plunge into the metaverse — a virtual environment that exposes users to immersive experiences and allows them to interact virtually with each other through digital tools. After Mark Zuckerberg announced in October 2021 Facebook’s rebranding as Meta and unveiled plans to build a metaverse, the term became an industry buzzword, prompting tech giants to consider this domain for investing.
Although the metaverse is unlikely to fully integrate users in 2022, it’ll be one of the major AI research trends within the next 12 months. Together with virtual and augmented reality technologies, AI will be part of the backbone of the metaverse.
AI-powered virtual agents will help people connect and interact in this new virtual environment. The creators of the world-famous AI robot Sophia will release an animated virtual version of the robot specifically for the metaverse. Tokenized Sophia beingAI will interact with metaverse users “anywhere, anytime, across devices and media platforms,” its developers claim.
In a comment to Bloomberg, Jeanne Lim, the co-founder of beingAI and former CEO of Hanson Robotics, the Hong Kong-based company behind Sophia, said she hopes this new form of AI will align humanity and technology “to help humans attain our true nature of unconditional love and pure possibilities.”
Synthetic media generated by AI, colloquially known as deep fakes, will also become an integral part of the metaverse. Powered by deep learning, metaverse platforms will need more generated content, which is something that can be created fast and at low cost by synthetic media. The technology has potential to benefit creators and help them monetize their content in the new immersive reality.
Last but not least in our list of AI trends for 2022 is improved language modeling. The technology enables computers to analyze semantics, predict words to complete sentences and even turn text into computer code.
Probably the most promising new tool for language modeling is the release of GPT-3, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, by OpenAI. It is the most complex language model existing to date with over 175bn parameters that machines use to process and generate human-like language. In August 2021, OpenAI unveiled an improved version of its tool Codex to translate English into programming code.
The company is already working on the next iteration of the model, GPT-4, that is rumored to be 500 times the size of GPT-3. It’ll have up to 100 trillion parameters, which is on par with the number of synapses in the human brain. This model will have the capacity to imitate conversations that will be hard to distinguish from human conversation and it will be much better at creating code. It still remains to be seen though, whether OpenAI manages to launch a beta release in 2022.
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