Jim Cramer recaps the year in generative artificial intelligence

CNBC’s Jim Cramer looked back on the year of artificial intelligence and highlighted some ways it has affected the world.

“The good news? Generative AI can’t do everything,” Cramer said on his Thursday show. “The bad news? What it can do, it does better than we’ll ever do, unless maybe you’re Einstein or Beethoven or Oppenheimer and Mozart.”

Cramer asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s chatbot, Bard, to tell him some of the ways people are using generative AI.

Using generative AI to generate art, such as music and photorealistic images, has become popular and it can sift through massive data sets to determine which drugs have the potential to cure medical problems that have yet to be solved. It can also be used to increase productivity, among many other applications.

“Generative artificial intelligence can pretty much do whatever it wants, anything we want it to, and if we don’t ask it, another enterprise will and that competitor will get the answer faster and better than we can arrive at it, which is why everybody is ordering all this stuff,” Cramer said.

Cramer also pointed out some ways the technology can be alarming. He got Summa Cum Laude on his Harvard general exams after intense studying, but he said that’s something Bard could have beat him on.

The number of applications of generative AI is staggering, but Cramer said the potential of the technology itself is not what limits it.

“Because AI is so amazing, we may never again have enough semiconductors to meet the demand for all those use cases because it’s hard to think of something these two programs really can’t do,” Cramer said.