2024-01-09 13:14:53
From January 9 to 12, the American city of casinos will transform into a paradise of talking machines. Computers, of course, but also speakers, vacuum cleaners, cars, beds… These devices “boosted with artificial intelligence”, according to the established expression, should be the stars of the 2024 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The largest technology fair in the world is held, like every winter, in Las Vegas (Nevada).
“This year, CES will be full of personal assistants (chatbots): it’s the revenge of the virtual trombone of the 2000s! », smiles Gilles Moyse, president of the company reciTAL, a French start-up dedicated to language and document processing. A “revenge” enabled by the advent, at the end of 2022, of generative AI systems: like the now famous ChatGPT, they make it possible to create original content (text, image, sound) after having been trained on immense volumes of data .
Chatbots of the past operated in a more rudimentary way, with decision trees and pre-generated responses. “ Now, we can communicate with the machine in natural language: it understands what we say and reacts accordinglyenthuses Gilles Moyse. This will profoundly transform the way we interact with our digital environment! »
An “umbrella term”
Some observers, however, put these contributions into perspective, and warn against a tendency towards« IA-washing » : like ecology with “greenwashing”artificial intelligence tends to become a marketing argument in itself. “It’s not so much about not lying as it is about overplaying, dramatizing the new: the tech industry has always worked like this”specifies Louison Carroué, doctoral student at the Center for Sociology of Organizations (CSO) at Sciences Po.
This specialist describes artificial intelligence as “umbrella term” : very encompassing, it has the advantage of allowing numerous actors to position themselves in a manner “fairly flexible”in particular to hope to benefit from the generous funding earmarked for this type of project.
“On AI, the marketing discourse of companies is very different depending on the recipientspecifies entrepreneur Gilles Moyse. In the eyes of a tech investor, doing AI is highly valued. But for the general public, it is more ambivalent: as “all-IT” is scary, brands instead highlight the ability of their products to simplify people’s lives. » He cites this Crédit Agricole slogan as an example: “100% human, 100% digital”.
“Making AI”
The enthusiastic, even frenzied, use of the AI “label” in the tech industry, however, is not new. “In the second half of the 2010s, the industry was using it as an equivalent to machine learning (the development of computer programs from very large numbers of data, Editor’s note),” recalls doctoral student in sociology Louison Carroué. “Then, this “buzzword” started to run out of steam… Since the end of 2022 and the provision of ChatGPT by OpenAI, it has come back in force, but now to talk about generative tools. »
One thing is certain: “doing AI” is a convenient and somewhat quick expression that many companies adapt to, without specifying that they have only created an interface to a large existing language model, and developed by companies like the American OpenAI or the French MistralAI or LightOn. The computing power required to train such models is in fact so staggering that few players can afford it.
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