A.I. is finally here. Prepare for everything to change (eventually)

Without hyperbole, I can finally say that AI – truly powerful and more generalized AI –?is finally here, and it's going to change every part of your life and every part of society.

So get ready.

Let’s start by going back in time 20 years.

I was in college, I was studying abroad in Israel, and I worked at a fascinating startup before AI really existed –?run by a multimillionaire Israeli entrepreneur who transformed his mansion into an early AI training facility.

His name was Yaki Dunietz. The company was A-I.com

In his Tel Aviv / Savyon mansion – he had one room where there were psychologists, linguists basically providing positive, negative feedback to the system.

And he had another room where programmers tuned the inputs of a system.

What they were looking to do was basically pass the Turing test at a reasonable level.

I think in the end they got to something like (if you really squinted and gave it generous credit), you could argue it was roughly at a 2nd grade level. But you could definitely tell you were talking to a computer.

I had evolved a really long way from the days of ELIZA, which was a crude rules-based system that was fun to play around with. It was a long way from all the other rules-based, very domain specific AI of that day.

But the technology simply wasn’t there yet - both in terms of approach and computational processing power, and large scale applied neural networks, ensemble learning algorithms and a ton of other learning approaches hadn't yet arrived in full force. Hell, we didn't even have Facebook or the iPhone yet.

Since that time, I have also done work with government and military agencies on AI for all sorts of applications as part of internships / consulting projects, and have seen things develop a very long way.

And I've continued to be interested in AI for two decades.

But then I went off and I started a couple companies and I went to grad school and invested in all sorts of stuff.

And while I was still hacking a bit on AI on the side (if interested, check out fast.ai, Andrew Ng's courses, etc.)?I didn't take the time to really dig in deep.

Then earlier last week a friend asked me to sit down and play around with ChatGPT a bit.

It had been on my list, and I knew I was behind the curve on this.

I started interacting with this damn thing and my mind was blown.

As we started talking the consequences of the tech behind this, my buddy compared it to the moment when he first got on the internet –?think AOL dial up – you pick up your phone and you hear a computer communicating –?one of those seminal moments in tech.

I really believe we're at a similarly fundamental shift in tech now, an AI equivalent to the Gutenberg printing press where the change is big enough to feel magical.

You can have GPT-3 write a multistage game of any kind. It can design any picture you want. It can give you business advice, it can write an investment memo, it can write a gratitude letter, it could write a sarcastic story. This thing is deeply powerful.

So somewhere in the last few years, collectively, OpenAI, and I'm sure Google, and I'm sure all major national security agencies, especially China and the US, have started cracking the code at an even deeper level. I can't even imagine what's available non-publicly right now.

This thing is so intelligent that there was a Google engineer working on the ethics responsibility task force at Google and publicly broke his confidentiality agreement to say, "Hey, this thing is sentient." (here’s the article). While Google’s system is a bit different from GPT-3, it's likely they are all built on the same similar machine learning approach.

So where will things go?

Everything will converge to the same place. All major companies and governments will learn from each other. And I'm very thankful that OpenAI decided to keep this thing open, to not have this power within one company. That was a beautiful and very prescient intention behind it.

But without hyperbole, I believe this is the beginning of a trend that will change every aspect of our society.

From the obvious things like the number of people you need to run a company, whether you're going to need sales people, whether you're going to need every single knowledge worker job where it previously necessitated someone to be thoughtful, to write copy, to write emails, to engage with prospects –?instead, you're going to have the world's smartest computer that has trillions of times more knowledge than the smartest human being walking the planet has in its head, with infinite training and tuning, tirelessly doing your work around the clock.

Try the thing out. Give it a shot yourself – https://chat.openai.com/

I also realized I was going through a natural human reaction to any technology –?shock and fear.

My first reaction was: “Oh my God, why am I hearing about this now? Everything's going to fall apart. What does this mean for me? For society?”

And then I realized that it's pretty obvious that I would have that default knee-jerk reaction. Evolution has tuned each of us, some more than others, but all human beings who have survived to this point, to be more fear-based, more survival-based than more opportunistic, "what could go right?" attitude.

But rather than get stuck in these negative "what if?" scenarios, I soon realized this will provide opportunity in every single part of society.

Just like the advent of gunpowder and metal brought horrendous things as well as the ability for countries to really be brave and defend human rights and democracy.

Just like the atomic bomb brought horrible things, but also the ability to have really positive things happen and to have countries avoid fighting.

Just like the Gutenberg press brought Mein Kampf and it brought the vast distribution of the Bible or whatever inspirational book that you love.

Emergent AI has the same potential.

And it's a really, really interesting time.

Expect the nature of warfare to change. Hopefully we never see this in our lifetime because that's probably the biggest threat we have is just humanity destroying ourselves through this technology.

But expect your job to change, no matter what your job is.

Expect our entire society to change.

Not from ChatGPT or GPT-3 itself– but from the technology that will rapidly continue emerge from this kernel.

Give this thing a test drive, see for yourself.

And then not only go through it, but ask yourself, there's a deeper, kind of, call it spiritual question or lens of the world – How are you seeing the world and what will you make of this opportunity?

How might each of us use this technology for good?

How might we both carefully make sure that it is ethically managed and regulated?

That's a whole different and important conversation.

Hopefully we have intelligent regulators that can get ahead of this (I have some doubts). But how might you apply this in your life for good, for the good of your own life, that of your family, your community, your tribe, but hopefully all of humanity?

And thinking back, I'm about 41 years old, and I reflect back to 20 years ago – it was like just the conception of the iPhone. Facebook was just getting started. The world we will live in 20 years from now, I cannot even imagine.

Everything will be hyper personalized.

You'll have movies that are based on exactly what you're looking for.

We'll look back and say, "Wow, we actually only had these movies created by these big studios that spent millions of dollars and did this thing, had to fly all over the world and it took years."

Or songs. We had this list of songs that you can kind of crudely put into your own playlist. But now literally we will live in hyper, hyper, hyper personalized worlds. And when you add the metaverse on top of this, I think, a big portion of humanity will eventually be living in some version of ready player one.

So what will you make of this? How do we take this technology and not hide in a cave and say, "Oh, it doesn't exist." Or wave it off and say, "This is not really intelligent yet. Let's wait to see what GPT-4 can do, etc."

But this thing's going to move very, very fast, both transforming our life and then reaching this peak of having AI train the AI itself and start having this exponential growth of intelligence.

How will each of us choose to harness that for the good of humanity?

Read the article in Spanish here: 

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/por-fin-lleg%C3%B3-la-ia-prep%C3%A1rate-para-que-todo-se-transforme-