The Friday Thing #833
Anyone have a solo nugget after last week’s edition?
The Friday Thing #833 is something I added to my collection this week. That collection is one of anecdotes and analogies that I am always on the lookout for. I think it’s a real skill to come up with compelling analogies – especially ones that take a complex topic and simplify it with a simple storytelling device. The one I added to my collection this week comes from a 35-minute discussion at Davos between Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor in chief of The Economist, with Sam Altman of Open AI and Satya Nadella. If you’re an Economist subscriber, you can watch the whole thing on their website. If not, you can get some of the highlights in this YouTube clip.
It really was a great discussion about the current state of AI and as Zanny pushed for predictions on how far off we are from AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), Sam offered an anecdote that I thought was clever at the time – and have since gone back a few times to watch the video as I have thought about it more (the sign of a good anecdote?).
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In explaining the journey he believes we’re on to AGI, the analogy Sam offered was the difference between the first iPhone from 2007 and a current model iPhone 15. When the first iPhone came out it was revolutionary and hard to imagine how it could be improved upon. Sam then noted that he couldn’t remember one particular moment in the journey from iPhone 1 to iPhone 15 that was the “moment” that took us from that first device to what we have today – yet they are staggeringly different devices with different capabilities in hardware and software.
I thought it was an elegant way to describe how innovation is rarely (if ever) a single eureka moment and is almost always incremental. The mythical singular moment makes for a good headline and it's what people crave, but the truth is both more mundane, yet more remarkable. The best and most breakthrough innovations come from relentless, diligent pursuit with a big appetite for failure and capacity to learn. And what Sam did is make that simple for people to understand by applying it to an object that many people are familiar with multiple versions of. Great analogies do that - they simplify (and often synthesize) complex things - and the journey to AGI is complex for sure.
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In addition, it made me think about the phrase "incremental innovation" which is one I have used in the past to explain these journeys and I realized "incremental" is not quite right. Evolutionary innovation feels more appropriate because incremental could be misinterpreted as small or even trivial where often the changes between versions are not small. So, I think it’s a nice balance between incremental and eureka. I’d welcome any feedback on that though or other ideas?
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That's all for this week. Music for today is Florence and the Machine with You've Got The Love.
Happy Friday.
Cheers,?
-Steve
Global Strategy Leader | Private Equity PortCo, Big Four, and FTSE 100 Experience | Currently Open To a Suitable New Challenge
1 年I really like the term 'evolutionary innovation' - innovation is not usually +1 and in small steps; we often have to go -1 to take bigger strides forward (and repeat). Another term to throw into the mix is 'exponential innovation' on the basis that the need for innovation becomes progressively more rapid Steve Clayton.