Rise of Artificial Intelligence

Reference to interview with Sam Altman by AngelList Link

I wrote an article called AI and Free Information and I touched on the idea that AI is an incredible tool that will allow people to boost their productivity by simply editing the AI-generated content instead of starting from scratching. This is very helpful for a wide variety of people such as professionals in any form of content editing and marketing, entrepreneurs and founders looking to get affordable assets and so on.

In the interview with Sam Altman, he digs deeper into the possibilities of AI and the cornerstone is simple, making intelligence accessible and low-cost. To understand intelligence, I will generate a response from GPT3.

What is Intelligence?
Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. It is the capacity to think, reason, understand, communicate, remember, plan and solve problems. Intelligence includes cognitive abilities such as comprehension, perception and judgment as well as creativity and abstract thinking.

Although not all cognitive abilities can be simulated yet by AI models, this is just the early days. So far, we can see that GPT3.5 can curate information from a large corpus of information before 2021 and produce very direct and accurate results like what we see above. The same goes for models like DALLE and Stable Diffusion, which generate impressive generative art based on any prompt that you give it.

The impressive parts are many:

  1. First, the model actually generates the result of text or image that you are expecting to see as a human. Using their method of humans in the loop to train the models, the models have become good at producing what a human is expecting to see.
  2. Second, the model generates the result at a record-breaking speed. In all honesty, it is much faster than a human being. For example, you can tell DALLE to generate a retro-style painting for a frog jumping over the moon and it would produce that shit. Look the image below.
  3. Third, the model generates this at a very low cost. In order to get some art, you would have to do it yourself or pay someone to do it. With DALLE, you can generate your art in seconds at no cost. Same thing goes for GPT, where you can produce some good marketing copy or get help on a development problem at a low cost.

The cost of intelligence is decreasing and the scope of intelligence is getting wider and wider. I remember when we just used to talk about recommendation engines as the only examples of what AI is good for. Now we can see text being generated to summarise large amounts of information on the internet. We are seeing generation of art using on text prompts and getting creative results in return. The world is getting a glimpse of what is to come. All of these developments are happening faster than we could have anticipated. Sure, we are not going to see Skynet any time soon but we are going to see many professionals using AI to skyrocket their productivity and get themselves ahead of the curve. It is a pure arbitrage moment for the well-informed.

The future is too bright to see. From my imagination, there will be pros and cons. Of couse, the pros are:

  1. Increase productivity for knowledge workers for AI comes in to assist them in gathering, organising, curating and presenting information.
  2. Reduced costs in paying specialised labour like illustrators and web designers to produce assets.

On cons:

  1. Less need for certain easily-automated roles like basic illustrators and web developers
  2. More need for skilled labour in management, creativity and in-depth knowlegde in subjects of design, development, engineering and so on.

For the applications, I see the following things:

  1. More advanced digital assistants that have more context about what you need and how they can get it for you ie. Scheduling calls, recording notes, generating code for certain tasks
  2. Digital professionals in content such as video editors, illustrators, web developers, copywriters, marketers and so on.

These are only scratching the surface of what is possible with AI.