Is AI For Real, or Just the Latest Tech Bandwagon?
It’s no secret that technology evolves in cycles.
In the mid 80s, everything was about personal computing. Then the World Wide Web arrived in the 1990s. Social networks were hot in the early aughts, before mobile platforms took off with the Apple iPhone in 2007. More recently we’ve watched as crypto rose (and rose, and rose, and rose) before more or less falling apart in the last year.
Next up? Artificial intelligence.
According to the most recent?McKinsey Global Survey on AI, adoption of AI technology is up 2.5x since 2017 and now as many as 60% of businesses say they have implemented AI-driven solutions. “The average number of AI capabilities that organizations use, such as natural-language generation and computer vision, has also doubled—from 1.9 in 2018 to 3.8 in 2022. Among these capabilities, robotic process?automation?and computer vision have remained the most commonly deployed each year, while natural-language text understanding has advanced from the middle of the pack in 2018 to the front of the list just behind computer vision.”
Per McKinsey: “A set of companies seeing the highest financial returns from AI continue to pull ahead of competitors. The results show these leaders making larger investments in AI, engaging in increasingly advanced practices known to enable scale and faster AI development, and showing signs of faring better in the tight market for AI talent.”
More recently, we all saw OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool jump from zero to more than 100 million users in just a few months following its public release in November 2022. OpenAI is now on track to exceed $1 billion in revenue by the end of next year.
AI is, to put it mildly, everywhere right now.?
I’m getting pitches daily from AI-powered content generation shops. Google wants me to use its new AI optimization tools to improve client advertising performance. And even Hubspot, which claims to exist to foster organic and customer friendly marketing, is offering me new AI tools to replace much of the engagement work that humans have been doing.
But is it all for real?
Shirin Ghaffary, writing on?Vox, says yes, pointing to the millions of people who are using ChatGPT in new and creative ways as proof.
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People in Silicon Valley are prone to making grand proclamations about new technologies. If you’ve watched the rise and fall of?crypto?or heard grandiose plans about how we would all be living in the?metaverse?by now, you may be wondering: Is the excitement about generative AI just hype?
The answer is that while there’s plenty of inflated hype about generative AI, for many people, it’s much more real than Web3 or the metaverse has ever been. The key difference is that millions of people can — and already are — using generative AI to write books, create art, or develop code. ChatGPT is setting records for how quickly it’s been adopted by users — it took the app only five days to reach 1 million users (by contrast, it took Instagram 2.5 months and Twitter two years to hit the same milestone), according to a recent Morgan Stanley report. Even though it’s a nascent technology, almost anyone can quickly grasp the potential of generative AI technology with apps like ChatGPT, DALL-E, or Lensa. Which is why so many businesses, giant and small, are jumping to capitalize on it.
While it’s true that Silicon Valley has been on the hunt for a truly disruptive new technology wave for years now, there are real reasons to question that AI is it.
For one thing, the technology itself — while certainly impressive on the surface — isn’t as fully baked as its backers want us to believe. (Not to mention the emerging questions around?AI’s use of data.) Yes, generative AI can “create” but it isn’t pulling from true intelligence but rather a dataset that is always growing and changing. There’s a difference, and it is starting to show up in the products that this technology is delivering.
And there are signs that AI is becoming just another tech buzzword. As?The Wall Street Journal?wrote last year: Trend-hoppers have moved from Web3 and blockchain to artificial intelligence. “The Venn diagram is a circle.”
Finally, there are good reasons that this is taking off right now. Simply put, companies like Microsoft, Alphabet and all the rest really need a win. (Remember the whole metaverse thing that was supposed to be the future of tech?)
Business Insider’s Linette Lopez is?calling AI?“Silicon Valley's last-ditch attempt to avoid a stock market wipeout.”
“Silicon Valley has entered the Hail Mary phase of its business cycle — a desertic part of a tech-industry downturn where desperation can turn into recklessness.
The biggest players of the last decade are facing an existential crisis as their original products lose steam and seismic shifts in the global economy force them to search for new sources of growth. Enter generative AI — algorithms like the viral program ChatGPT that seem to mimic human intelligence by spitting out text or images. While everyone in Silicon Valley is suddenly, ceaselessly talking about this new tech, it is not the kind of artificial intelligence that can power driverless cars, or Jetson-like robot slaves, or bring about the singularity. The AI that companies are deploying is not at that world-changing level yet, and candidly, experts will tell you it's unclear if it ever will be. But that hasn't stopped the tech industry from trying to ride the wave of excitement and fear of this new innovation.”