It’s already hard to imagine a time when artificial intelligence wasn’t ubiquitous. But with summer tech events season in full gear, examples of AI integration today are around virtually every corner.

A year full of hype kicked off with a massive amount of attention and buzz around OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT setting a record with an estimated 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch.

“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” Reuters quoted financial firm UBS Group AG as stating.

Though the hype was through the roof, theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante’s assessment was measured: Though the hype was justified, OpenAI wouldn’t lock-up the market with its first-mover advantage.

“Rather, we believe that success in this market will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of data that a technology company has at its disposal and the compute power it has to run the system,” Vellante wrote in a late January edition of his Breaking Analysis series. “This market is unlikely to display winner-take-all dynamics and will probably evolve in a more fragmented fashion than cloud computing.”

Since then, theCUBE has been following the advancements closely, tracking the announcements from the big players while separating the signal from the noise. There’s a lot of hype in the space, but there’s a lot of excitement around effective use cases as well.

Here’s where theCUBE analysts actually see generative AI going in the coming months and years.

The most important story of the year

Though it’s only summer, it’s clear to many working in the tech space that AI has already become the most important story of the year. It’s reached the point where if a company doesn’t have some kind of AI story at its summer conference, people start asking why they’re “burying the lede” and wondering if a company is out of touch, according to Vellante on a recent episode of theCUBE podcast.

Still, amid the AI gold rush, it’s important to avoid “AI-washing” — promoting a product as having integrated AI when that claim might be spurious or underwhelming — while still integrating AI into one’s narrative.

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it, but not everyone has it,” theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier said on a recent episode of theCUBE podcast. “There’s a lot of AI-washing accusations, meaning people throwing AI and everything to kind of seem hype. We’re seeing people do it in our industry all over the place.”

There are different strategies in place by companies to pull off this balancing trick. Take Cisco Systems Inc., which has avoided the AI-wash accusation recently with a proposition that it will infuse AI into everything that it does. Then there’s Dell Technologies Inc., and its announcement of Project Helix, a partnership with Nvidia Corp. that will turn into a product next year.

The past number of months have also seen stocks move higher in the wake of new AI announcements. Oracle Corp. beat expectations in June, and promises of an upcoming generative AI service sent its stock higher. The company said it would introduce a new generative AI cloud service in partnership with the startup Cohere Inc., which would be similar to Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service. Or take Salesforce Inc., which in June said it would add large language model support across its portfolio of applications.

The AI gold rush is indeed on, and the paths to monetization are seemingly endless, as Vellante put it in a May edition of his Breaking Analysis series.

“Catalyzed by the OpenAI LP-Microsoft Corp. partnership, organizations are rapidly trying to figure out how to apply these tools to create competitive advantage. Every firm on the planet wants to ride the AI wave,” Vellante wrote at the time. “Virtually overnight, investment capital has shifted to fund early-stage AI startups, with much less funding required relative to previous boom cycles.”

On the impacts to come

Though it’s still early days in terms of understanding the impacts of AI on the general workplace, one survey from KPMG LLP, which polled 1,035 U.S. white-collar workers, indicated that 43% believed generative AI posed an immediate threat to their jobs but just 19% were concerned it would make their role irrelevant.

“It’s still too early for any of us to know about the full impact of AI on the workforce, but it’s possible that many of the respondents are hopeful about the potential for Gen AI to augment their work versus threaten their jobs,” Sandy Torchia, KPMG’s vice chair of talent and culture said in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE.

Still, the debate around regulation has continued throughout the year, with the big question being how much regulation is required and how much would just impede innovation. The big players have been a big part of that debate. In May, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman told lawmakers that the U.S. should consider implementing new rules to ensure the safety of AI systems.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that, in 50 or 100 years into the future, some of the scenarios that people worry about could come to fruition, according to Vellante.

“If there are machines that are autodidactic, that can learn on their own and that are more intelligent than humans, they become our overlords,” he said on a recent episode of theCUBE podcast. “I don’t know what the probability of that is, but it’s probably not impossible that it happens. People, I think, are rightfully concerned about that. Like you always say, everything in the movies becomes true, except teleporting.”

Still, regulation is a complicated task, especially when some point to individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, who have tech monopolies, when calling for more oversight — and there are legitimate doubts that Congress could handle such regulation, according to Furrier.

Strategizing to win the AI battle

ChatGPT may have brought the mainstream computer user to the table, but AI is a battle that has been fought for some time now.

“All the insiders, we know, have been doing AI for a long time. Google’s one of them. Google has so much AI. It’s ridiculous how good they are. Now, the question is, can they hold on to their engineers?” Furrier said on a recent episode of theCUBE podcast. “Or will they flee to join a hot startup? Can they get out of their own way to create good products?”

Google LLC recently made news in the AI space, including with its Secure AI Framework to help companies protect AI models from hacking. More movement is expected at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco in August. But the company is its own enemy right now, as Amazon Web Services Inc. has stronger management relative to competing and executing than Google does, according to Furrier.

“They have Bedrock, which is their product, and they have advantages. People right now are afraid of their intellectual property leaking. They’re afraid of their data,” Furrier said. “Data will be the IP of the future.”

When it comes to data, Snowflake Inc. has been eyeing the future of data integration and AI, and at the recent Snowflake Summit, the focus was on the company’s ongoing competition with AWS, Google, Databricks Inc. and Microsoft for domination of the next-generation data platform market.

“Snowflake, as people know, have been on a wild ride. They’re basically on a run rate … about $2.4 billion,” said Vellante, referring to the company’s high net revenue retention.

With the hype set aside and all of the trends considered, it’s clear that the gold rush is on and that companies must capitalize on their AI narratives without falling victim to “AI washing.” As entrepreneurs look to establish the next Dropbox Inc. or the next Airbnb Inc., what might the next-generation startup look like? Will it be OpenAI?

There’s a recognition among theCUBE analysts that these are still very early days in the business. OpenAI is unlikely to be the company that people remember in 10 to 15 years. It’s not the next-generation startup. In fact, it might just be the “browser,” according to Furrier.

“I think they’re the Netscape,” he said on a recent episode of theCUBE podcast.

Image: metamorworks / Getty Images