Are you freaking out about AI yet?

August 2022

“Not enough technology freaks people out today.” That was the first line I wrote in a piece exactly one year ago called, The One Technology You SHOULD Freak Out About . It is hard to believe that back in August 2022, not many outside of tech inner circles discussed AI, much less freaking out. It was a time when folks seemed indifferent to new technological announcements, and rightfully so. New smartphone releases, once big news, showcased merely incremental improvements. Things like the Metaverse and Cryptocurrencies had no use cases that matched their hype. So, most new technology releases were met with a collective yawn.

If you were to ask yourself, “Is this technology going to make my life better?” or “Is this technology going to make my life worse?” the combined answer to just about every technology being released around 2022 would have been a “No.”

But in the summer of 2022, we were on the cusp of something different. Text and image generation models were getting exponentially better in a relatively short time and were starting to become useful.

How much better are the models getting?

You can use metrics to measure the models' performance over time. You can see how OpenAI aces the bar exam or AP Tests . But I like to ask different models the same question.

If you ask ChatGPT 4.0 , “What is the most complex question I can ask you?” it gives a detailed, well-structured response that can serve as a springboard to a more robust conversation.

If you go back to the GPT3 Ada model, released about three years ago, this is the response I got.

The “intelligence” of these machines has leaped from a curious 6-year-old to a brainiac 18-year-old in three years.

As Axios surveyed earlier this month, 62% of Americans are either “Somewhat concerned” or “Mostly concerned” about AI. Vanity Fair used the exact words recently, saying the New York Times leadership is “Freaking Out ” about AI. 42% of CEOs say AI could destroy humanity in 5-10 years. So, I think it is safe to say that collectively we are “Freaking Out.”

Should we be freaking out?

If we go back to a prior question, “Is this technology going to make my life worse?” most of us are looking at AI and saying a resounding “YES.” People are worried about it taking jobs , stealing our work , and ultimately diminishing the things we have appreciated for millennia that make us uniquely human.

Given that, we should be freaking out.

But as with almost every technology since the creation of fire, they can be used for good or bad.

Is this technology going to make my life better?

There is so much potential in existing LLMs, and we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of their capabilities. Anyone with an internet connection today can access the world’s most powerful machines with infinite potential at their fingertips. And they don’t need to know how to write a single line of code to access it.

I hope that, like with most technologies that have come before, the good will outweigh the bad. As a society, we are doing a pre-mortem on what could go wrong and trying to address that now. We won’t get it perfect, but we must keep our eyes open for what could go wrong.

We are all freaking out today about AI, and that’s good. Most people are freaking out about the downsides. But we should also be freaking out about how amazing these tools can become. Not a week goes by where I’m not giddy from a new product announcement or something Claude or ChatGPT helped me do. As ChatGPT told me when I prompted it for a quote about the balance we need to take with AI, "AI's possibilities are limitless; don't let caution become a ceiling." That's a pretty good quote, making me freak out just a bit more.

What freaks you out about AI? The good or the bad. Discuss in the comments!