Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1495507
5.12.19 12 OPINION 23.3.2023 Alexiei Dingli Prof Alexiei Dingli is a Professor of AI at the University of Malta and has been conducting research and working in the field of AI for more than two decades, assisting different companies to implement AI solutions. He forms part of the Malta.AI task-force, set up by the Maltese government, aimed at making Malta one of the top AI countries in the world Get your dose of office productivity boost F or decades, many Artificial Intelli- gence (AI) experts felt like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness, heralding the coming of something sig- nificant. Over the years, there have been many false starts and setbacks in the de- velopment of AI. But in recent years, we have seen tremendous advances in the field. But now, the mass adoption of AI technologies is finally here. ese tech- nologies are slowly changing every aspect of our lives, from education and health- care to transportation and manufactur- ing. But unless you've been living under a stone, the tool that captured many's imagination is undoubtedly chatGPT, the AI-powered chatBot capable of creating human-like outputs. But chatGPT is al- ready passe since its successor, GPT-4, is already in use. However, it seems that people do not realise the profound effects this will have on their productivity at work. So let me try to explain it. When searching for information, our first port of call is undoubtedly Goog- le, a traditional search engine. So let's say someone wants to find the tallest mountain in the world. He would typ- ically think about search terms such as the "tallest mountain", type the search query, and the search engine will look through all the websites on the internet. It will then find the page that mentions the relevant words and rank the results based on their relevance to the search. e user must review those links, read through the pages and identify the needed information. In technical jar- gon, the process is called information retrieval. On the other hand, Bing integrat- ed GPT-4 with its search engine. e process is substantially different. e person would still think about search terms and type the search query, but the similarities stop there. Bing would im- mediately return the name of the tallest mountain. e process is called infor- mation extraction, which is much faster than what we're traditionally used to. But this is just the start. Just think about Office 365. Microsoft is inte- grating GPT-4 with it as a new feature called Copilot. is service will help us- ers save time and effort in various ways while boosting productivity. Here are some concrete applications: • Writing assistance: Copilot can assist in the writing process by automatically adjusting spacing to improve legibility, adding speaker cues to help during presentations, and suggesting improvements to strengthen the proposal. For ex- ample, when creating a custom- er proposal, Copilot can quickly use customer notes and internal documents to make a first draft, insert product images, and pull relevant visuals from other files. It can even generate an FAQ section for the proposal. Furthermore, since Copilot can also suggest ide- as, writers can finally bid farewell to the frustration of writer's block. • Presentation creation: Copilot can quickly turn a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation, complete with professional design treatments and speaker notes. High-resolution original visuals can be generated on the fly using powerful AI models. Users can add slides and give Copilot in- structions to make the presenta- tion more visual or animated. is feature saves time and effort in creating engaging presentations for meetings and pitches. • Data analysis: Copilot can ana- lyse data in Excel and generate in- sights and actions. For example, if a user needs to analyse quarterly sales results, they can ask Copilot to analyse the data and give three key trends. It can then create a new sheet to drill deeper into one of the trends and visualise what contributed to the decline in sales growth. Furthermore, the appli- cation can even create a simple scenario model and generate a projected model graph. • Email management: Copilot can help triage the inbox and priori- tise important emails, saving us- ers hours. It can also summarise long email threads and generate replies using data from an Excel file. Users can edit and make the response more concise, change the writing style, or add more context. is feature makes us- ers' lives easier by responding to important emails quickly and ef- ficiently. Overall, Copilot can increase produc- tivity by automating repetitive tasks, suggesting improvements to strength- en work output, and enabling users to work more efficiently and effectively. But you should keep in mind that this is just the start! We know that when Microsoft bought Skype, the video-calling platform, they actively worked on real-time automated transcription. is technology makes it possible to see a real-time transcript of any call in your native language, irre- spective of whose at the other end. Mi- crosoft has another tool named VALL-E that can replicate a person's voice from just three seconds of audio. So by com- bining the two technologies, one can easily listen to the other person speak in your native language, mediated by AI, even though he might not know a single word in your language. e era of Star Trek's universal translator is around the corner. Another impressive technology is AI-generated images which let the AI create any scene imaginably. However, users find it hard to make visual scen- eries exactly how they imagine them. ey must navigate through complex prompts, squeezing their neurons to devise ways of directing the algorithm. But work is ongoing to make it even easier by combining GPT-4 with image models like DALL-E. Some even allow users to remix different images as in- puts, possibly rubbing off parts of an image and letting the system dream ad- ditional variants. Such technology is the first step, and at the moment, there is al- ready active research to create AI-gen- erated movies. As we look at the future, it is becom- ing clear that the possibilities unleashed by AI and its related technologies are limitless. From saving us time and effort in our daily tasks to breaking down lan- guage barriers, the potential for these technologies to change our lives is im- mense. With the introduction of tools like Copilot, we're already seeing the trans- formative effects of AI in the workplace, and it's only a matter of time before we see similar advancements in oth- er fields. As we continue to push the boundaries, one thing is for sure: the future of AI is both exciting and unpre- dictable, so expect more disruptions in the coming months.