October 7 2024
By Minseo Kim
Have you heard the business quote, “During a gold rush, sell shovels”? It comes from the idea that when gold was discovered in California in the past, the people who made the most money were the ones who sold them shovels. The recent AI gold rush has proven the adage true, with Nvidia being the biggest beneficiary of selling GPUs, which are likened to shovels.
At Open AI Devday 2024 on October 1, Open AI showed four major updates. The hottest topic was the Realtime API, which enables voice conversations to be sent and received in real-time, saving time and resources by consolidating the three steps of speech recognition, intent determination and answer generation, and speech output into one. This allowed answers to be generated without missing or distorting input information.
What makes this API special is that it has the potential to be used for AI-based interactive English learning services, provides various services in cars using only voice, and replaces many of the roles of telephone agents. Furthermore, the 'Function Calling' feature allows developers to easily connect with external APIs to automatically retrieve and provide financial information or public data, allowing them to implement various innovative ideas directly with a single real-time API.
Devday this year has created an environment where anyone with a simple idea can create an AI t-service at a low cost. Whereas last year, Open AI was held in check by its confidence with its ambition to change the world with AI, this time around it seems to be hiding its ambition and build a larger ecosystem. This is because tools like Realtime API, while seemingly helping developers and enterprises, are likely to make them more and more dependent on the OpenAI platform and keep them within the OpenAI ecosystem instead of developing their own technology.
Recently, OpenAI raised another large round of funding, signaling its transition to a for-profit company. The announcement at Devday 2024 is also a strategic move with this transition in mind, and this makes people look forward to seeing what the next year will bring for OpenAI.