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The recently released and updated GPT-4 is rapidly changing the landscape for natural language processing (NLP).
What other sectors are changing rapidly? We focus on innovations across the three key themes that are aligned with our current investment thesis; AI, healthcare and fintech.
GPT-3 created one of the greatest buzzes we’ve ever seen in consumer technology and with the latest version, GPT-4, already adopted by companies like Microsoft and Amazon, we believe this trend is far from being short lived and will rapidly transition to the enterprise.
The days of building bespoke models from the ground up may be over.
Every company with NLP as part of their solution will now be considering if building on top of large language models (LLM) will achieve better results. The astonishing progress of LLMs like GPT is going to allow companies to build NLP powered applications that unlock incredible and valuable use cases.
After all, considering what generative AI enables, like the lowering of technical barriers for creation and personalisation, we can see how it could generate long term value, drive efficiencies, boost engagement and create sustainable long-term moat within organisations. Naturally, we can expect more widespread adoption of generative AI from companies.
In addition, we are also excited about the next generation of applications and tooling that this technology will power; writing code, product design, character development, lead generation, investing, drug discovery, to name a few. With that there will be an even greater focus on explainable AI to address the trust and safety considerations that will inevitably arise.
Albion has previously bucketed our digital health thesis into digital care and digital pharma and, at a high level, described them as two siloed domains. Digital care was focused around the provision of care, and digital pharma was focused towards the generation of evidence informing care.
We have started noticing the blurring of lines, where many companies have products starting on the care side but the collected datasets could be used to speed up evidence generation, thus leading to their presence on the digital pharma side.
This year and beyond, we expect the digital pharma and digital care spaces to continue to grow closer together.
The distinction has previously been between evidence generation in pharma, and the use of that evidence in care, but the model is trending towards an integration of these functions as we usher in the digital revolution for health.
It’s no secret that we are big believers in the application programming interface (API) economy. Over 80% of the internet traffic goes through APIs today. APIs have become best of breed and nowhere has this been more true than in financial services.
Today, there are over 4,000 financial services APIs available globally, offering an increasing rich array of features and functionality. However, this choice has led to an infrastructure jumble.
At the consumption end, the demand for personalised, feature rich financial products with seamless user journeys, combined with the supply of a complex web of individual financial services, is creating a whirlwind of problems for businesses looking to push the innovation envelope.
We believe the answer, and where we will see massive growth this year, is in the financial services specific orchestration layer. This refers to those businesses that enable the process of combining different technologies (e.g. APIs, cloud services, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications) to create a unified platform.
This reduces the overhead of managing multiple services, providing customers with a more secure, efficient, and cost-effective experience - the lego board for the lego if you will.
Our investment in Toqio exemplifies this belief. Toqio provides a SaaS-based global financial orchestration platform that enables any business to launch financial solutions, without building and managing complex software.
Without it, a customer looking to launch a financial product would (in-house) need to integrate and productise a user interface, a customer operations layer, multiple product components (e.g. different payment solutions) and adhere to the appropriate regulatory licenses. While the underlying APIs are the fuel, this new layer will become the operating and delivery systems for them.