Generative AI as a New Platform for Applications Development
Michael A. Cusumano, Vivek F. Farias, Rama Ramakrishnan · 2024
Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly emerging as a powerful new platform for software development—a foundational technology enabling a wide variety of applications, like past platforms such as computers, smartphones, and cloud services. Major players include producers of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI, Google, and Meta; hardware and software providers like Nvidia; and cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. An ecosystem is evolving with infrastructure layers, foundation LLM models, an array of tools and frameworks, and a rapidly growing set of applications spanning horizontal products for broad usage as well as customized vertical solutions. Key issues going forward include potential market concentration, data privacy and ownership concerns, the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated content, regulation versus self-governance challenges, disruption to jobs and industries, and significant environmental impacts from increased energy consumption. As capabilities and adoption of this new AI technology expand, companies, universities, governments, and technology experts must think carefully and collaboratively about the costs, benefits, trade-offs, and potential dangers of GenAI as a new applications platform.