Friday's AI
“Words matter,” the copywriters' mantra.? Watching October's baseball playoffs, I saw a Watson X ad that began “People are excited about what AI is going to do for them. We're excited about what AI will do for business.”
The panning triptych of humans wonking out on their interfaces transitioned into seamless hook up shots of the ‘possibilities.’ It’s a multi-phase campaign with a wide array of social / entrepreneurial touch points. Then, that queasy feeling started. Are people - humans that is - really excited about what AI is going to do for them?? Seems like an inversion of the premise given Sam Altman’s tempered enthusiasm about openAI’s Promethean LLM. While humans have adapted to technological change throughout history, he feels that the issue we confront is the speed with which it's taking place.? He’s very much in the Faustian trap here, holding on to his soul while admiring the way the ‘thing’ grows, changes … learns.? He’s not an unconscious inventor, in other words. ? At the WSJ’s Tech Forum this week, he posited that humans need to have agency, they need to be architects of their own futures and, as a matter of public policy, there should be a universal basic income … because jobs, near term, are going to be impacted??
Earlier in the day at the same forum, Vinod Khosla (long time VC & early openAI investor) dropped this: within 10 years AI will be able to do “80% of 80% of all the jobs we know today.” Specifically, the more routine procedures currently done by physicians and accounts. Quite the prognostication.
IBM does have a novel B2B approach: #1 - they will indemnify corporate users of its targeted AI models and #2 - they make the underlying data sets that train the models available to the customer(s) - not so, chatGPT. That's Watson Xs differentiator, but 'consumers' aren’t buying Watson X platforms, businesses are. I’m curious about IBM’s push in broadcast media. As an ad person, I support the push in ‘traditional media’ because it supports a lot of jobs. (Separate topics: 1) I'm curious about how tech challenger brands (not IBM) in B2B generate acquisitions, and I wonder how successful this campaign is for IBM; 2) I'm also interested strategists and communications leads perspectives about whether there's any real difference B2B or B2C).
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Here’s my worry: the future looks to be about technological hegemony and God help anyone outside the tech bubble.? We must be versed in the language, modes and customization of these emergent technologies or we - humans that is - are sort of the wrong tools for the jobs.? Does everyone need to get a Post Grad minor in Statistics, Matrices and Python?? Maybe English as a 2nd language will be true for all native speakers.? Should our 1st language be code/script so that we know how to interpret and sort large amounts of data that IS us.? The cliche is more true every day - it's not you ‘they’re’ after, it’s the data you generate!???
This extractive monopoly power used to be the provenance of Google & Meta, but maybe this LLM thing is going to upset that primacy.? If - as IBM’s premise goes - every business wants to optimize its data flows via their own platforms, then consumers will just be (hyper)linked with ‘affinitive’ products/services that we already use or have an emerging need for.? Is AI a near term threat to Google’s domination of search? If so, I’m sure they’re working on it, double time. Bardo is where Mountain View is going… not just ‘Bard’ sic “I sing of arms and a man,” “O the times, O the customs,” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”? Bardo is the intermediate state between death and rebirth in Buddhism, so maybe Bard is just short for Bardo!? What if the intermediate state IS the state?? There’s no ‘re-birth,’ just another?? I'll get off the psilocybin now and leave you with a few questions (apologies for the naivete):
Is Google’s monopoly on search contestable? Do the LLMs (AI neural networks) present opportunities for challenger brands??
Where do companies like telcos & network providers fit into the landscape of search beyond the dominance of Google? If that’s even possible?
What businesses will benefit the most from adapting the customization / personalization of their (product / service / brand) via domain specific user data? Will every business benefit? Who is it NOT right for based on the cost barrier of entry?
Does government regulation represent the 'anti-AI' because regulation by its very nature is restrictive and attempts to set guardrails and impose penalties? (If decades long interpretation of the FCC Telecommunications Act allowing platforms to avoid the liability publishers have, I wouldn't be too concerned).