The excitement that surrounded the personal computer revolution in the 1980s and the advent of the world wide web in the 1990s has surely been eclipsed by what’s going on in artificial intelligence today.
Bill Gates – who was around for both eras – believes that the “development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone.”
The Economist and others go further. They liken what’s coming with AI to the impact the printing press ignited 600 years ago, when a new general purpose technology led to an explosion of knowledge and productivity, as well as widespread upheavals and disruptive social change.
ChatGPT – the fastest-growing internet app ever – and the large language model that powers it are the fuel behind the excitement. The app is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It’s so good at answering a wide variety of questions that it feels as if you’re chatting to the collective knowledge of humanity (or at least the publicly available text the AI was trained on.)
I’ve worked in tech as a “non-techy” person on the investment and operational side of things for several years now, and I get to meet technologists often. I also often seek out and synthesize non-mainstream content about technology from a diverse group of friends, Twitter accounts, forums, and niche blogs. Never in this time have I felt a greater sense of technology acceleration than now.
From AI researchers highlighting that “2023 has already seen more advances in AI than any other year,” to hearing from software developers about how thrilled they are to build on this new technology, and how some are terrified of it (the potential near term challenges and long run risks should not be ignored), the path ahead is going to be full of surprises.
How should we prepare? I’m not entirely sure since I’m also just coming to terms with what’s happening. However, I’ve adopted the technology early (I first spoke about GPT on a BBC show back in 2020); I’m exploring how I can invest in entrepreneurs who are building AI tools that will get us to the future more safely; and I want to learn and do more of what makes us positively and uniquely human.
My hope is that we end up in a future where AI helps us solve some of the world’s biggest problems, rather than make them worse. But for that to happen, a lot more of the public will need to engage the topic today.
Note: This was written entirely by a human.