[ad_1]
Former managing director of Google Taiwan, Lee-Feng Chien, described 2022 as a year of major advances in AI development. Chien, who has advised many start-ups, has also found that IC design talent with project management experience is best suited for entrepreneurs. However, they must be willing to leave their comfort zone.
In an interview with DIGITIMES on Dec. 28, Chien pointed out that advances in AI in 2022 will mostly be about language models. For example, his ChatGPT on OpenAI sparked widespread discussion. Previous breakthroughs in this area were when Google launched his language model BERT in 2018 and when his DeepMind team at Google launched AlphaGo, a Go AI program.
ChatGPT is already a threat to major tech companies
He further explained that AI techniques can be broadly divided into two areas: computer vision and language models. People already knew that computers had powerful memory and computational power. When computers started recognizing items, people started to get scared. People were amazed when computers began to conduct conversations in a natural way. As such, advances in language models are particularly noteworthy.
He now believes that ChatGPT acts like OpenAI’s “firepower display”, demonstrating an increasingly “human-like” representation of AI. Although not yet in production, it already poses a threat to major technology companies. It is expected that major companies will devote resources to the development of related technologies.
Many people compare ChatGPT to Google’s search engine. Chien said the conversations generated by ChatGPT are not real-time and chaotic. Also, ChatGPT does not provide any sources of information. Such characteristics are inappropriate for a search engine.
Chien pointed out that the Turing test was once a standard way of benchmarking machine intelligence against human intelligence. In other words, an AI product is considered well-designed if it cannot recognize that it is interacting with an artificial intelligence. Today, however, AI must “do the right thing” to be considered intelligent. For example, Stanford University already has a team working on new standards for measuring AI, Chien said.
Furthermore, as the former director of Google Taiwan has observed, AI models require a large amount of computing resources. Therefore, as AI and cloud computing technologies continue to advance, Taiwan’s server and hardware manufacturers will continue to benefit. It also creates space for startups to thrive.
The IC design department is a hotbed of successful entrepreneurs
“In Taiwan, the most suitable people for entrepreneurship come from the IC design sector,” Chien said, because IC design is the intersection of software and hardware development. Some examples include NextDrive co-founder Jer-Yuan Yan and Aiello co-founder Vic Shen. Both are from the IC design department.
Although Taiwan’s foundry capabilities are world-leading, it is still a capital-intensive industry, making it difficult to foster startups. Foundries have many customers, but in the early stages of development they may not know what their product is. In contrast, IC design is directly related to the application, which gives the application a better understanding of the market.
“Two out of three entrepreneurs in the IC design space will succeed, but they need to be able to get out of their comfort zone,” Chien said. He also believes that unlike hardware suppliers who can produce products at different price points, software has no borders and needs to be the best in the market, so his software startup struggles to succeed. I said yes.
Chien emphasized that Taiwan has cultivated many software engineers who are good at solving specific problems. However, it is weak in terms of system integration, product release, and marketing. He suggested that entrepreneurs should “stand on the shoulders of giants” and integrate existing resources to develop innovative applications while finding suitable usage scenarios.
[ad_2]
Source link