Machine Learning - Trends 2023  

The speed at which AI is developing is rapid. New breakthroughs are announced every week and anyone who starts a project today based on the current state of the art will most likely be using yesterday's technology when the project is completed. In addition, AI applications are pushing into every area: in the plant technology of a mechanical engineering company, in human resources, in customer relation management, or in the tools of a web development company, AI can now be used everywhere.

The benefits that the technology can deliver across all sectors are already being seen by businesses. With new developments making it easier for everyone to access artificial intelligence, the potential has also become obvious to a wider audience. AI can write poems, emails and essays, not only speeding up everyday activities, but also impacting creative work and our education system. In addition, contrived AI responses and lack of traceability of results pose challenges. The trends selected by Bitkom for this year reflect an overall change in focus in the topic of AI, which can also be attributed to these developments: away from individual partial aspects of the technology towards a holistic view of the life cycle and the embedding in and interaction with larger systems. While last year we still dealt with Data-Centric AI, this year large-scale speech and multimodal models and especially their use cases are moving into the centre. The manifold application possibilities of the systems based on these models are particularly impressive. Last year, ML Ops was about how the scaled operation of AI in the company can be sustainably orchestrated. With the AI Factory, attention is now shifting to how business units can be enabled to implement and operate AI projects that create value for them. This year's trend topic AI Supply Chain also ties in with the need to take a holistic view of the integration of AI into the company. This also results in another trend: AI Compliance. While various aspects of this were already highlighted last year, AI Ethics and Sustainable AI, for example, can also be seen in the context of a comprehensive compliance concept. This is becoming increasingly relevant for companies, as regulatory projects such as the AI Act will be applied in the foreseeable future. The Differential Privacy trend from last year is not losing its importance in this context, as data protection continues to be a defining issue.