How to bypass the Observer's paradox of Generative AI.

We now stand at an exhilarating inflection point. Next-generation language AI is poised to make the leap from academic research to widespread real-world adoption, generating many billions of dollars of economic value and transforming entire industries in the years ahead.

Under the hood there are only a handful Foundation models:

However, if we look closely under the hood, virtually all advanced NLP in use today, no matter the industry or setting, is based on one of a small handful of massive pre-trained language dubbed by Stanford researchers as “foundation” models. (Stanford, 2021).

These Foundation models are built and open-sourced by the publicly traded technology giants—e.g., BERT (2018, Google); RoBERTa (2019, Facebook, Open AI -Now with Microsoft,2023) or the new ones Like Cohere, AI21, Primer, Inflection AI etc.

Increasing entropy in Startup ecosystem:

A nascent ecosystem of startups is at the vanguard of this technology revolution. These companies have begun to apply cutting-edge NLP across sectors with a wide range of different product visions and business models.

And if we try to loosely bucket them together these can be classified into 3 big buckets based on three "layers of the AI stack"??????????

i)?Back-end providers: Imagine late 90's and think of them as OS companies moving to GUI or like the cloud storage provider company migrating enterprises from their On-Prem in 2000s, essentially these companies will later morph into the framework tools of the new age companies. In the current noisy environment, few examples could be Cohere, AI21, Pinecone, Langchain etc.

ii) Building on top of it – Think of them as utilizing the back-end services, wrapping them up into a marketable product say a CRM of the early 2010’s. There are currently multiple real life business use cases in multiple industries and the current race is on to be the next “breakthrough” startup. Examples could be Gong, Hugging Face etc.

iii) Directly using it for different use cases: Think of them as the consumer or business facing new age startups, we all are currently using, such as another search company, social media company, music streaming platform etc. Not only this, pretty soon we will have the next HRGPT, legal GPT, etc. We have already witnessed the release of open API’s which will be the catalyst of the floodgate moment of such startup creations within the major Generative AI sub–sectors, which includes:

?? Text: Summarizing or automating text content.

?? Images: Generating images.

?? Audio: Summarizing, generating or converting text in audio.

?? Video: Generating or editing videos.

???? ?? Code: Generating code.

?? Chatbots: Automating customer service and more.

?? ML platforms: Applications / ML platforms.

?? Search: AI-powered insights

Pls note that each niche within this space is more than a billion dollar opportunity and individual startups will definitely carve in their own niches as well.

An unstoppable wave of billion dollar startups are coming: These entropies in the ecosystem not only heat up the ?stock market sentiment but also the Startup investor ecosystem: Billion dollar funding in startups. ChatGPT, while being cool, is just the beginning. Enterprise uses for generative AI are far more sophisticated.

The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing a “Cambrian explosion” of applications (2023, Sequoia, Bloomberg). Like, it’s namesake, this event will mark the rapid birth different species of startups with higher impact on how to consume, learn & work. This is nothing short of witnessing the emergence of the future age TITANS.

Rise of TITANS in Long term (2-5 years in AI calendar)

With the gradual advent of humankind from asking 5 basic questions to a search engine (what, how, why, where etc.), to now asking sometimes hilarious & sometimes dystopian prompts encouraging the "usage" of knowledge instead of merely gaining it. This will not only shape how we consume anything--- fill -knowledge, content, goods etc here & each will make sense--- but also will shape the new kind of jobs --- say from Proxxx Manager to Prompt manager, or computer engineering to prompt engineering.

In the words of Old analogies: now you don’t need libraries, you need content- novel, new content. Will this gold rush lead to next trillion dollar companies, only time will tell.

But I can say for sure that the court-side seat view is amazing. Looking at the Neuralink's project, integration of decentralization concept with generative AI, content creation battleground setup are only a few examples of what's to come. Exciting days we live in!

HOLD ON .....Where is the paradox you say?

As per definition, the?observer's paradox?is a situation in which the phenomenon being observed is unwittingly influenced by the presence of the observer/investigator.

Unfortunately, we are the observers in front of whose eyes the whole game was set up since the last 5 years. We watched how this was played out, including a non-profit initiative going for full profit company, or how the age old time to market was smashed like a paper OR [fill in any AI related news feed on your phone]. We are also the biggest contributor to this, being fed by and are feeding off the system by providing these large language models the right prompts, insights on how this new information land grab will continue. (Remember - most of the NLP are by giants)

The EVRYTHING APP!

Currently, Open AI have just unveiled their Master plan of having an app store (which btw in my opinion is just a beginning)- We all are now writing tool integration for the ultimate GPT- a single model that will read all the docs, chain apps on the fly, and enact changes on the world. The EVRYTHING APP is not a farfetched idea and is coming sooner than we might expect.

What will happen if the biggest monopoly dictates how we operate?

Off-course, there are multiple such situations or questions stemming from the cynical view of nature. This is just like saying that "yes, I can see that there is a tool being developed, I am aware that this is only a tool not magic wand and can generate extraordinary results. Caveat! If used in the wrong direction (like FatMan), this may have a probabilistic chance of going horribly wrong. I personally have chosen to see positive sides of the event and strongly recommend others to do as well.

My prediction:

Now, under the hood, essentially, we are changing our understanding of available portion of “the gathered human knowledge over ages”. Do note that data/information available on the web is just a fraction of what has been written. This in itself is a fraction of what is out there available in front of us. Real use cases, with real money-making opportunities are to be made in this unique era which is second only to the GUI movement– my understanding of a recent Bill Gates quote. So the race is on!

Still find it hard to believe?

We are not talking about ages from today, the board is set NOW !!, Pieces have been mobilized: domain names such as chat.com was recently sold for 8 figures, and prompt.com was sold for 7 figures- with NO WEBSITE. This is worth pondering over!

So, what am I am doing about it?

With my unique position of sitting at the intersection of whatever discussed above namely startups, investing etc. I am curious to see where it will go and actively participating in this movement.

Excited to have you join me on this journey of exploring the field of "everything AI & Startups" Let me know in the comments section if you would like to publish a weekly newsletter regarding the enhancements in the field.