Introduction Welcome to AI’s new inflection point ChatGPT has woken up the world to the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI), capturing global attention and sparking a wave of creativity rarely seen before. Its ability to mimic human dialogue and decision-making has given us AI’s first true inflection point in public adoption. Finally, everyone, everywhere can see the technology’s true disruptive potential for themselves. A foundation model is a generic term for large models with billions of parameters. With recent advances, companies can now build specialized image- and language-generating models on top of these foundation models. Large language models (LLMs) are both a type of generative AI and a type of foundation model. The LLMs behind ChatGPT mark a significant turning point and milestone in artificial intelligence. Two things make LLMs game changing. First, they’ve cracked the code on language complexity. Now, for the first time, machines can learn language, context and intent and be independently generative and creative. Second, after being pre-trained on vast quantities of data (text, images or audio), these models can be adapted or fine- tuned for a wide range of tasks. This allows them to be reused or repurposed in many different ways. Business leaders recognize the significance of this moment. They can see how LLMs and generative AI will fundamentally transform everything from business, to science, to society itself—unlocking new performance frontiers. The positive impact on human creativity and productivity will be massive. Consider that, across all industries, Accenture found 40% of all working hours can be impacted by LLMs like GPT-4. This is because language tasks account for 62% of the total time employees work, and 65% of that time can be transformed into more productive activity through augmentation and automation (see Figure 3). 3 A new era of generative AI for everyone |