ChatGPT craze

Too often, I am an optimist. But once in a while when people get ahead of themselves, I think it's a good idea to offer a reality check.

ChatGPT/Gen AI deserves a reality check right now. Too many people are trying to become a 'prompt guru'; too many posts are showing you all the wonders that it can do. Prompt engineering (is it even engineering?) courses, newsletters, podcasts and what not!

It reminds me of the summer of 2016 (or was it the winter) when self-driving cars showed up on the horizon. Google had all these awesome updates. And Tesla. And then all these YC and YC-like companies. Hobbyists were building self-driving kits literally in their backyard. All the big traditional car players had no option but to react!

That summer, it seemed imminent that self-driving cars would be on the roads the next day. Or the next year. In 10 years, human driven cars would be extinct - that's how it felt then.

But here we are, in 2023, still working through Level 3 self-driving.

All of that is repeating with generative AI today. Almost exactly so - it seems that both stupidity and genius repeat themselves with uncanny similarity.

Many people compare chatGPT to the iPhone - and how it might simply take off too. But you have to understand, introducing a new technology with finite bounds is vastly different from a technology that has no finite bounds. It's a bit like being stuck inside a log cabin in the Amazon rainforest and finding a way to survive. A hard, but finite problem. Versus being out there in the open jungle and not knowing what you will have to grapple with at any given moment. An infinite problem.?

Those two are vastly different challenges, and the second one is exponentially hard compared to the first one, even though they might seem similar.

Don’t take me for a pessimist. There’s no bigger believer in the potential of AI than me. I tell people that it’s a bigger shift than even the internet. When I recently spoke at the Sandler Summit about the role of AI in sales, I called upon people to adopt it en masse. My company Humantic AI is at the forefront of AI (we predict people’s behavior!) and Generative AI (we are a user for more than a year now). I myself have been working with AI actively for 10+ years (this is my second AI startup) and passively for 25 years (yes, you read that right).

No one can predict the future, but if we are to learn from history, we have a long enough way to go. The current euphoria would start hitting the walls of reality soon. And it would lead to the 'trough of disillusionment'. Most of the opportunity seekers and hype creators would disappear. Far fewer of us with a genuine belief in AI would stay. Working through all the edge cases and constraints; and finally, probably slowly, taking the technology mainstream.

So if you are Gen AI enthusiast, that’s the question you need to ask yourself - am I ready to work through the winter (that will most likely come)? Or am I here for just the sunny days??

You know the answer already.