The Hardest Thing

Last year I did a presentation at an AI conference where the keynote speaker was Greg Brockman from OpenAI. If you are intimidated speaking publicly, try imagining speaking at a meeting where one of the founders of the Company that built ChatGPT, one of the top five most important human innovations in all of recorded history (e.g. the wheel, fire, printing press, steam engine and ChatGPT) is also speaking, and you'll have some sense of my experience, and I speak every week of the year at conferences, keynotes, workshops, etc.

The presentation I delivered then was entitled: "The Hardest Thing: The Role of Human Factors in Adopting Generative Artificial Intelligence in Life Sciences", and while it is exceptionally true that it is not the tech that is the challenge, it is always, always, always the people, I have a new hardest thing.

There is too much damn innovation. We've been taught that innovation happens rarely, it is scarce and infrequent and we should be thankful if we even catch a glimpse of it; the idea of it coming fast and furious is anathema to most of us.

Every week, every day, almost every minute there is more new AI news; it's almost impossible to keep up, even as an expert in the space and as a Chief AI Officer as I am.

I really don't want to be writing about the same stuff as everyone else, but YOU HAVE TO SEE SORA. What's SORA? It's OpenAI's version of ChatGPT, but for Video.

Here is a clip explaining how momentous this is, and how much has changed in AI-powered video in the last year:

(1454) AI Generated Videos Just Changed Forever - YouTube

And a SORA-produced video of Santorini. When I say SORA produced, no one went to Santorini to script this, shoot it, edit it, etc. There is a single prompt, in text, and out pops 8 seconds of generative video. SORA can do this for a full minute of video, emerging from the generative brain. Amazing! Brilliant! Unbelievable. A bunch of other SORA-produced videos also available herein. Sidebar-I was fortunate enough to visit Santorini some time ago and this is evocative of that visit; if you hadn't told me an AI produced this a priori, I wouldn't have known any better:

Sora (openai.com)

Just imagine the implications for education, for healthcare, for politics... oh, wait, just a second.

The world of communication and creativity, of humans, has changed.

You heard it here first. The hardest thing is that we're not wired for this much innovation. Maybe it's time we start getting used to abundance instead of scarcity...