Generative AI - Looking Beyond the Headlines

Unless you have been living in seclusion, AI has finally found its hero use case. Generative AI, with chatgpt at the forefront, has generated a mix of intrigue , awe , and fear in recent months.? Spend an hour online, tune into any TV channel, or peruse a newspaper, and you'll find endless discussion about AI being used in both uncanny and exceptional ways, even threatening to usurp our jobs. Opinions are evenly divided on this debate. I decided to delve deeper into these headlines to examine their veracity.

But first, Let’s first understand AI and Generative AI(Gen AI). Put simply, AI is defined as the ‘development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence’.Powered by advances in storage and computational power, AI has been rapidly maturing over the past few years. Until a few months ago, most of these advances focused on recognition, enhancing decision-making by processing vast amounts of data, and areas such as translation. We were content for AI to do our grunt work. However, the advent of Generative AI changed the game. Generative AI, capable of producing various content types, signifies a step-change for AI. When AI can start making sales calls, interacting with customers, evaluating operations, crafting ads, building marketing strategies, and authoring blogs, we enter a whole new paradigm.?

AI will take away all our jobs

The prophets of doom extrapolate these capabilities to the conclusion that computers will soon render human work obsolete, leading to widespread unemployment. Could AI-driven bots perform some future jobs better? McKinsey's recent report on the economic potential of generative AI points to four significant areas: customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and R&D. McKinsey estimates that almost 60-70% of hours could theoretically be automated now that Generative AI has entered the market.?

However, a deeper analysis reveals that nearly 50% of this potential existed before Gen AI's arrival. And the timeline McKinsey suggests for realizing these savings stretches to 2050- 2075. Looking back, Yuval Noah Harari noted in 'Sapiens' that the industrial revolution did not create widespread unemployment; instead, it spawned new jobs and significantly improved living standards. We are likely to witness a similar pattern with this 'Knowledge Revolution.'

AI is just the new tech bubble - more hype, than reality

Naysayers dismiss AI as another tech bubble, more hype than substance. While there's no denying the hype around AI today, Goldman Sachs anticipates a potential 7% rise in GDP due to Gen AI. McKinsey estimates the total impact of AI (Gen AI and others) to be close to $17-25 trillion. Jobs have already started to be impacted. Customer support teams, branding, and marketing professionals are already feeling the competition from AI, and these are just the early days. The reality is that Gen AI will become an incredibly potent tool that will fundamentally redefine job roles.

Ai will be like the internet, digital natives brought up on a ‘Google search’ world will take to this change easily. The big challenge will be to get your business workforce to change and adapt to pick up AI-supported work. A Gen AI 101 course is going to be far from sufficient.?

Generative AI is ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’

I just loved the above headline, purely because of the sea change in opinions from last year to this year around AI. Until recently, AI was the domain of organizations' CTOs. Nowadays, every CEO seems to be discussing Generative AI. One of our customers, recently mentioned that the only way to get IT budgets approved this year was to dump Gen AI on Page 1 of the proposal. There seems to be some amount of FOMO around the Gen AI space and everyone wants to at the very least talk about embracing it. However, most experts agree that foundational AI use cases will provide organizations with significantly more strategic and productivity value in the short and long term than Generative AI. Don’t misunderstand me, it’s great that Generative AI has helped break the barrier between tech toy plays and real impact - but it is not ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’.?

AI will take over the world

I couldn't complete this article without covering this headline ??. An AI that can now do all the creative stuff that humans felt only they could do, not just play chess or Go? Despite recent milestones like chatgpt passing the Turing test and an ex-Google engineer claiming his AI achieved sentience , there are still many significant hurdles to overcome. The reality is that there are still many huge steps & chasms to get anywhere close to AGI. I will put it more simply, just search for the number of ways teenagers can fool the current set of tools or the obvious limitations and this quickly becomes a non-starter of a headline. In the spirit of moving beyond my own beliefs, I happened on this talk here by Yuval Noah Harris on “AI and the Future of Humanity” ? and that radically shifted my opinion on the above topic. I would love to see your thoughts and comments on the same.?

In conclusion, AI, including Generative AI, presents a fantastic opportunity to dramatically increase productivity and improve living standards if used and adopted correctly. AI will impact our jobs, but only if we dismiss it as a passing fad. The fundamental challenge will not be finding use cases, but the speed of adoption. Regarding job losses and AI ruling the world - most of us have jobs that didn't exist when our parents were working. I don't think the next generation will lament the lack of chat support jobs. Nor do I believe we will end up like the humans in Wall-E or The Matrix, not just yet.

And for those wondering, I did ask chatgpt to help edit and re-word this article, but the opinions are purely mine.