Artificial intelligence is no more just a technology these days but has become a part of our daily lives, whether it’s asking ‘Alexa’ to switch on the lights, or using AI-powered apps to take care of our health. Moreover, the tech is transforming daily with solid developments made around the year across academia, and research labs of major tech giants and industry. Chatbots, smart automobiles, and IoT gadgets are the most recent breakthroughs in AI. Further to this, AI is used in the healthcare, finance, logistics, and tourism industries to deliver a better experience. 

Here are some of the major developments globally in the field of AI making a ripple effect for the industry as a whole. 

AlphaFold 2.0 from DeepMind 

The research lab from Google, DeepMind open-sourced Alphafold 2.0 - an AI program developed to predict the protein structure, and the development holds ground to revolutionise the field of cellular biology. Proteins are the building blocks of tissues, hair, muscles, enzymes and even the antibodies. They underpin every biological process ever known to us. Each protein has an intricate 3D shape that defines what is its role and how it works inside the human body. However, decoding this structure of proteins was an uphill task for the healthcare community.  The AI-based algorithm will help the research community from diagnosing fatal diseases more precisely to accelerating the drug discovery process.  

Tech giants going AI way for chip design amid shortage 

As the covid hits, the demand for tech gadgets skyrocketed in a matter of time. Some of the top semiconductor manufacturing firms including TSMC, Samsung, etc. felt the heat and were unable to meet the demand for chips in the market. Soon, the tech giants turned to artificial intelligence, with Google utilising deep reinforcement learning for producing the next-gen Tensor Processing Units (TPU). On the similar lines, the South Korean behemoth Samsung is using AI features in new software from Synopsys, as reported by Wired. Other big players such as NVIDIA and IBM also made inroads into chip designing by AI. The inclusion of AI in chip designing seems to be a possible solution to automate and fasten up the process, however, still in its early phase the step needs to be watched out carefully. 

South Africa becoming first country to grant patent to an invention by AI 

‘Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience’ (DABUS), the AI-based creativity machine by Stephen Thaler invented a food container. Ryann Abbott, Thaler’s attorney and his team filed an application for the patent in September 2019. After much consideration, in July 2021 the South African court recognised the machine as an inventor – the first time any invention by AI is granted a patent. The decision came as a big surprise for the global community. Till now, AI-generated inventions are either unregulated or patents are granted in the name of natural person only.  

AI21 Labs Challenging OpenAI’s dominance in NLP 

The Israeli AI company AI21 Labs released Jurassic-1 Jumbo, a language model with 178 billion parameters. The model is slightly bigger than the widely known OpenAI’s GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters. Jurassic-1 from AI21 Studio is the company's new NLP-as-a-Service developer platform, which includes a website and API for creating text-based applications such as virtual assistants, text simplification, content moderation, chatbots, creative writing, and a variety of other new products and services. With the availability of this tool, the developers can produce customised text-based AI applications.  

Sneak-peek into World’s first ‘AI-on-5G’ lab 

NVIDIA announced its partnership with Google cloud to establish industry’s first AI-on-5G Innovation lab. The plan is to assist industry and AI software partners to develop, test, and deploy solutions that will expedite the development of smart cities, smart industries, and other sophisticated 5G and AI applications. Moreover, the telecommunications sector is undergoing a massive upheaval, as 5G's high speed and low latency provide new prospects for AI-on-5G delivery at the enterprise edge.