Maybe you’ve had a play with ChatGPT. Or maybe the latest laptop you purchased has AI capabilities – but you’re not sure how to use them. No matter how familiar you are with the concept of artificial intelligence, there’s no doubt that it’s becoming a more prominent part of our day-to-day lives, in everything from service centre chatbots, virtual assistants such as Alexa or even monitoring and predicting likely outcomes from our health results. So, we asked an expert to break it down for us. Dr Stefan Hajkowicz is the Chief Research Consultant at CSIRO (Australia’s national science organisation). He wrote the roadmap on Artificial Intelligence for Australia in 2020 – and he’s excited about what it could mean for all of us.

Hands typing on laptop keyboard with futuristic AI interface overlay, showing interconnected nodes, data streams and an ‘AI’ icon in glowing blue.

What Exactly is AI?

AI is a powerful set of integrated technologies that can be used to recognise patterns and predict outcomes. Machine learning is at the base of AI, and this is the ability of the machine to look at a pattern, determine that pattern and then to predict how to do the next thing or create the next thing. So it's a powerful set of technologies that can augment human beings and increasingly go into the space of human activity. 

The question of definition is something that we struggled with when we wrote the roadmap for Australia on AI, and it is something that is hard to define from some perspectives – you could say that it doesn’t actually exist! But the term captures all of these autonomous systems and quite advanced mathematical modelling capability.

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What Was the Key Turning Point for AI Becoming So Prolific?

Well, when we look at the history of AI, it really began in the late 1950s and it goes through a couple of what we call ‘spring’ and ‘summer’ periods of growth and expansion, but it also had a couple of ‘winters’ where it really contracted and we thought it was all over. Now, we seem to be in a prolonged springtime where it’s just growing, growing and growing. It’s not showing signs of going into a winter phase and contracting again. 

In 2017, some Google researchers published a paper called ‘Attention is All You Need’. And this paper put forward what’s called the transformer architecture, which was a new way of doing machine learning with deep neural networks. What it effectively did was focused the machine learning algorithm on the parts of the data that mattered most. Let’s say you and I have an English test and we both have to read ‘War and Peace’. Your version has all the bits highlighted that you’re going to get questions on with sticky notes so that you can study those parts. My copy has nothing. I just have to learn – I’m the old version of AI, right? I can learn it and do okay, but we know that you are going to do a lot better in the test and be a lot quicker because you’ve effectively got all the answers. And that’s what the transformer architecture did for AI; it just gave it this massive upgrade. 

In 2017, a small part of the scientific community started developing these models. Those models hit the airways in 2023, when we started to see that capability of the transformer architecture with tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Microsoft CoPilot.

A person using an AI-powered travel app on a smartphone to plan a trip to Bali. Several screens showing the AI-generated travel tips are superimposed on the image.

What Will the Next Big Development in AI Technology Be?

There’s this race towards developing AI’s foundation capabilities and Google has an objective to [offer capabilities to] build your own AI assistant. That’s probably the goal, at least for the next five years, that you will have your own personal AI assistant. You'll ask them how to make a recipe. You'll ask how to do something at work. It will be learning you. It will be able to automate a lot of the things that you do on a regular basis in your job, but in your life as well. It might start to be able to provide you investment advice, whether or not that’s attainable; there’s data privacy issues and huge concerns about the amount of power the tech corporation has. But it could be incredibly powerful and useful depending on where it goes. 

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So Will AI Technology Continue to Evolve?

There’s two schools of thought right now for the coming five years of AI. One school of thought is that we’re going to plateau, that we have seen the returns to using masses of data and computer power and we’re going to start to see it level off and people are going to get used to it. I think still even with nothing new invented in the world of AI, with just what we’ve done so far, there is an enormous amount of change. 

The other scenario is where the curve isn’t levelling off; the curve is about to get a lot steeper and we start to see successive versions of AI really blow our minds in terms of their ability to reason and to perform complex tasks at your request. What if there's another thing like the transformer architecture in the pipeline that we haven’t really figured out yet how important it is that it comes to us? What if the returns to increased computational power keep on happening? It doesn’t level off, it just keeps on getting better and better.

So What Does That Mean for People Day to Day?

Even in scenario one, that world is still one where there’s a lot of change for you in the coming five-year period. You’re going to have to learn new things. Your skill sets will change. It doesn’t mean you necessarily need to become more technically competent. It might make a lot of things more accessible to you in fields such as engineering, architecture, law. It’ll change the way large corporations work. It’ll change the markets they operate within. I’d say it’s the most significant driver of business transformation in the foreseeable future.

But part of an AI strategy, I think, is also not having anything to do with AI. It might also be to increase the human side of your business and the human interaction and the real touch, feel, see stuff as well. I wouldn’t downplay the importance of those things, too.

A person interacts with an AI chatbot on a desktop touchscreen displaying multiple-choice answers and AI-related questions in the background.

How Can People Make the Most of AI in Their Lives or at Work Now?

What the imperative for everyday workers is to start to say, ‘Well, how can I use this toolkit to get more enjoyable work, better work, improve my career, get a better payback, do more with less and increase my free time?’ You want to start experimenting with it. I’ve got Claude and Gemini open on my screens all the time, and I might use them to do some assessments of legal risks associated with the contract with data privacy and confidentiality securely. I’ve also been using them to check my code and using ChatGPT to help speed up the process of writing those scripts. 

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What Are You Most Excited About in the AI Space?

The thing that I’m really hopeful for is that this gets rid of a lot of the stuff that’s painful, difficult, and sort of slows you up – a lot of the administrative things, reconciling our credit cards, filling in all the forms. And that annoying bit, which is up to a third of a job, disappears for a lot of us, which frees up time for someone like you to really think creatively – that you can actually take the time to go for a walk in the forest or along the beach and you're not feeling like you’re not working, because all that busyness has just been zapped. You’ve just been given an extra two days a week because of AI, but you are investing that into getting deeper into areas and you’re really taking it to the next level, because you’re able to do that, and you are working in harmony with all this text so that you can relegate jobs to it. You know how to get trusted information out of it. 

That’s my hope, and I hope that applies to all sorts of professions. The other thing is the possibility that deep human knowledge and expertise across different fields, disciplines and professions becomes way more accessible and democratised. That also excites me. 

And then at the societal level, if we do this well, this could be the four-day week, this could be better jobs, more enjoyable jobs, safer jobs. In 10 years' time, if we’ve done it really well, not only are we earning more, we are working less, we’re doing really interesting stuff and we can achieve so much more in our work that matters. 

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