On Synthetic Intelligence

Hope calling AI or Artificial Intelligence 'Synthetic Intelligence' might not banish me from the echelons of technology but it still would raise much eyebrows. Ever since chatGPT appeared sometime in 2022, the human race has suddenly taken a penchant toward GenAI or Generative AI. Generative AI is a type of AI which can generate any type of content be it text, audio, video or image. The singular moment of human truimph came all thanks to NVIDIA's GPUs which fuelled algorithms capable of generating any type of content. From then till now the entire world's gone gaga over GenAI.

However this is all a fad similar to Nintendo's Pokemon Go which died a slow death or Facebook's Thread which will eventually lose steam. While all this was happening I was talking to AI product managers and AI product entrepreneurs and asking them about potential use cases. Unfortunately most folks sold out on the fad aren't really aware of use cases where GenAI can solve a human centric problem. For that instance what are those problems is what should be the talk of the town. Everyone was sold out on GenAI's content generating capabilities to such an extent that these discussions didn't really form the epicenter of the global collective consciousness.

As I was grappling hard to understand the impact of commercial products like chatGPT on the human diaspora, OpenAI was fighting its own battles. The board proclaimed "Let there be blood" and soon enough Sam Altman was fighting the biggest battle of his life and it kinda reminded me of the the famous battle of Thermopylae where Spartan King Leonidas with his 7000 men fought bravely against Persian King Xerxes's insanely huge army. This time unlike history Altman won the battle and came back as the CEO of openAi, thanks largely to his tech billionaire's buddies and largely to Microsoft's intervention again due to the epic investment Microsoft had made in openAI.

Call it serendipity or an act of God if he really exists or she really exists but I chanced upon this book by Professor Karim Lakhani called 'Competing in the age of AI' which spoke about how AI is being leveraged by companies to transform the way they did business. It was gobsmacking to find Ant Financials disbursing loans worth 800B $$ using a 3-1-0 system where after a customer fills a form in 3 minutes, it takes the system just 1 second to accept or reject his loan and in 0 second the loan amount is in the customer's account. The fact that decision making is being done by AI clearly marks the advent of super intelligence though it would perhaps take couple of more decades for AI to become contextually competent at doing multitude of activities like humans.

The book spoke about what it takes to create a pure AI organization and it reminded me of the very simple fact that we are at the precipice of something really big. This AI revolution is as big as the current wars between Tesla and Edison or the calculus wars between Leibniz and Newton and it surely is here to change the design of the human society for Piketty to come up with a sequel to his ever charming memoir of economic inequality called 'Capital.' Professor Lakhani not only spoke about companies like Ant Financials, Amazon, Peleton and Netflix who are using AI in their day to day business and using network effects and learning to optimize their services but also spoke about how Microsoft revamped itself as an AI and cloud company stealing the thunder from underneath Google which is still coming to terms with the 'Gemini tragedy' and as luck would have it word on the street is that Altman is out on the streets to raise 7 trillion dollars for openAI which is precisely GDP of 2 or 3 India's or bunch of African countries.

Conclusively it would make more sense if the diaspora starts exploring the different problems AI can solve before AI starts becoming more and more sophesticated or else Alan Greenspan might not shy away from uttering the two words that defined the 2008 sub prime crisis- 'Irrationally Exuberant.'