AI: AI 'Digital Twins' approaching mainstream thresholds. RTZ #413

...both consumer and enterprise applications ahead

As I’ve outlined before, AI ‘Digital Twins’ are a central focus in the next innings of this AI Tech Wave roll out. A ‘mirror world’ like no other ahead.

Be they enterprise or consumer, used for ‘smart agent’ conversational chatbot applications, they’re coming. They can also be used for creating massive amounts of ‘synthetic data’ in 3D models of industrial/enterprise factories and facilities.

Being pioneered by products like Nvidia’s Enterprise Omniverse for the physical world, increasingly powered by Foundational Robotics, they’re an important part of the innovation race for tech companies large and small.

Axios this week highlights this again in “The digital twin baby boom”:

“The AI industry sees digital twins — virtual likenesses of a human or an object, built for research — as a powerful practical use for the technology it's spending billions to build.

“Why it matters: Tech companies believe they can unlock AI's potential by using digital twin technology to make copies of our physiologies, personalities and the objects around us.”

“Zoom out: Right now "digital twin" can mean anything from a statistical model of a complex phenomenon, like an organism or a weather system, to a video avatar of a billionaire trained on his speeches and posts.”

• “The term has recently become shorthand for AI models that promise to reverse disease, go to boring meetings in our stead and comfort our loved ones after we die.”

  

• “Digital twins can be an AI model of a person or a part of a person used to analyze large quantities of health data in order to provide more personalized treatment or speed up drug development.”

• “They can also be an AI model of a thing like earth, a city's topography or your trash bin.”

“By the numbers: Gartner predicts the market for digital twins will balloon to $379 billion globally in 2034, from $35 billion this year.”

• “Markets and Markets says the health care industry is driving the growth of digital twin technology, with an estimated market size of $110.1 billion by 2028.”

“The big picture: The concept of digital twins began in engineering and manufacturing — but expanded data storage and connectivity have lowered the cost of creating and maintaining them, opening new opportunities.”

• “The technology can seem magical because the models update automatically as new data becomes available.”

Axios goes on to provide a vivid example of digital twins with the AI digital twins created by tech luminary and Microsoft Board member, Reid Hoffman:

“Zoom in: Veteran tech entrepreneur and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman created his digital twin, Reid AI, with a custom GPT built on two decades of his videos and writings.”

• “Hoffman told Axios' Mike Allen at an Axios HQ event Monday that he wanted to show "the positive things we can do with all these technologies."

• “Hoffman previously wrote on LinkedIn that he was curious "how interacting with it might help me think differently, express myself in new ways, or connect ideas that I might not have otherwise."

• “Earlier this year, he released videos of himself conversing with the twin, and he sent it for an on-stage interview at a Bloomberg event.”

“What they did: Hoffman used Hour One to create the video and ElevenLabs for the voice.”

The broader point is that what may be a special project for a billionaire tech founder/luminary, is going to be a tech reality for mainstream billions in time frames measured in months, not years. And it is likely to change how regular people think about AI. Certainly beyond multimodal ChatGPT AI search boxes of today.

We’re going to see lots of implementations of ‘digital twins’ by tech companies large and small. They’re a natural for a world enthralled with social media from Instagram to to YouTube to TikTok and beyond. Across all ages, for hours a day of our time.

And while some applications will likely be for purposes that we don’t like as a society, we’re likely to be positively surprised about the net good these AI ‘digital twins’ will do for us all. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)