AI: open-source models imperil profits of big tech’s contenders

In the 1960s, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a natural language processing programme that could mimic human conversation. Named ELIZA, it was an early iteration of the chatbots running rampant across the tech sector this year. ELIZA was not a profitable endeavour. Neither are the current versions.

There are clear transformational possibilities in generative artificial intelligence. Chatbots developed using large language models (LLMs) could allow seamless communications between humans and computers.