Insight of the Week: Will AI Winners Take All
Us humans find it hard to understand exponentials.
If you fold a piece of paper in half 42 times it would be as thick as the distance to the moon! You can’t of course, due to the physical limitations on folding.
If you take 30 steps of 1 meter each, you’ll go 30 meters. If you take 30 steps but double the distance of each step, you’d travel nearly 27 times around the world!
These illustrate the mind-boggling impact of exponentials in unrealistic scenarios. But some exponentials are quite real:
Moore’s law states that computing power (approximated by the number of transistors in the best computer chip) doubles every two years. It isn’t actually a law, but it’s an observation.
AI costs measured by cost per token of inference have dropped by 90% per year, for the last several years.
An exponential process usually arises as a result of the process accelerating the process itself. As chips get more powerful, chip designers have better computers to design chips with. And as AI and chips get better, software engineers have better tools with which to build AI. We literally use AI to create training data to train AI, as I explained in my email on the power of AI fine-tuning.
Now let’s connect this ‘exponential thinking’ with my last two emails: AI agents for everything?where I talked about the potential of AI agents to work alongside humans in your business, and AI is not a strategy?where I talked about the importance of exploring how AI can work in your business.
If you can explore efficiently, and harness AI effectively, and do it fast, you’ll create competitive advantage. Because literally everything we’ve built: from trains to computers, religions to nation states, small companies to enterprise organizations, has been borne of our intelligence. Human intelligence.
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But now we have real machine intelligence. It’s not the same as human intelligence, but it’s intelligence.
If you adopt a strategy of exploration - and discover ways to effectively onboard and leverage this new source of intelligence - you, or your team, or your entire company, will gain a competitive advantage.
That advantage will mean you have more time, space, and resources at your disposal. And you’ll know that’s because of AI. So you’ll invest more in exploration. And more in leveraging AI effectively.
That will mean you gain even more competitive advantage. More time. More space. More resources. That you’ll re-invest.
It’s an exponential process. Which means that those who start first, explore smartly, and leverage AI effectively, will win.
If you do it right, AI will help you, your team, and your company win.
And because you’ll have an exponential process working for you, it could mean you win big.
Don’t get left behind.
Kerry Robinson is an Oxford physicist with a Master's in Artificial Intelligence. Kerry is a technologist, scientist, and lover of data with over 20 years of experience in conversational AI. He combines business, customer experience, and technical expertise to deliver IVR, voice, and chatbot strategy and keep Waterfield Tech buzzing.