> The thing that generative AI has going for it is that it is extremely broad in so far as its applicability. In other words, good luck selling my next door neighbour on generative AI. What is it? What is it good for? What problems does it solve in the here and now?
Disagree; I'd argue that the key distinction between generative AI and those other things (metaverse/crypto) is that the value of it is immediately apparent to almost anyone. There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.
> the value of it is immediately apparent to almost anyone
I'm not so sure that's actually true outside of enthusiast circles, to be honest. The value of what the hype describes is apparent, but the hype is about a possible future, not what's actually here right now.
There are a couple of people in my workplace who are using ChatGPT as part of their development process. So far, the value of them doing so isn't obvious to the rest of us. Their work isn't better, nor are they working more productively (although they think they are).
> There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.
Most noncomputer people I know have barely heard of ChatGPT, and those that have only know of it by the hype that has spilled over into the news feeds. They certainly don't really know what it is, and don't think of it as being anything important.
Those that do understand it and think it's important mostly consider it a threat and are afraid of it.
I do think there is a pretty extreme overlap between generative AI early adoptors and people who are excited to spend half of their waking hours interacting with an AI assisstant. Interest in the raw tech fades pretty fast the further you get from very online groups.
That said, the new tech is powerful and likely to have a large impact, just not as much through new interfaces as the hype suggests.
Unfortunately I think the biggest use-case for generative AI in the medium term will be automating away middle class jobs. The cabability is looking very possible, and the profit motive is immense. Despite the fun creative uses and the strong PR, the development of this tech is extremely profit focused.
Everyday people will likely feel the effects of this tech, but it mostly won't come in the form of fun and games.
I'm also terrified that the AI optimists are right. I feel like the closest analogy to the "upside" case is the advent of offshoring. Millions of middle class jobs will be wiped out in exchange for higher corporate profits and cheaper socks. Except in the AI case there won't be millions of people in other countries lifted out of poverty; all these profits will flow to the wealthy.
My 65 year old, tech illiterate mom messaged me the other day and asked if ChatGPT or Midjourney could be used to generate layouts for her new garden. I'm not kidding.
Of course the non-techies know it from the hype in the news; that's the usual pipeline. And of course they don't know "what it really is", because that requires specialized knowledge. But whether they "think of it as being anything important" is more a function of your circles; in mine, people are mostly terrified of what it will do to jobs and how it'll be used for surveillance.
You said that about "those that do understand it", which to me implies at least some degree of technical understanding. I'm talking about casual users with no background whatsoever, who have just been exposed to ChatGPT or (mostly) Bing AI.
Cool, so I'm Joe Sixpack next door. Things I care about: how to feed my kids, avoid getting laid off at the manufacturing plant I work for and my oldest daughter is learning to drive and has no idea how she's going to be able to afford a home of her own and, despite how much I love my kids, I really want her to move out before she's 30 so that my wife and I can enjoy retirement. Things I do for fun: play sports, video games and drink.
What problems in my life does generative AI immediately and obviously solve for me?
Like I said, it is "abstract" which is why you can make such a claim with such a high degree of confidence. Every person who sees POTENTIAL with generative AI has their own ideas as to what sorts of applications it has that they would find useful. The very words "generative AI" and "ChatGPT" create a Barnum Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect). Right now, I would posit that ChatGPT is like pet rocks. It got popular because it is neat and novel. Once that effect wears off, people will stop caring and the hype train will die as fast as crypto.
Therefore, until a company releases a product that uses ChatGPT under the hood and solves a real problem that a lot of people need solving right now, there's no tangible value that is inherent in the technology that can be identified. Only ideas and potentials.
Your problem is that you think we need to sell generative AI to Joe for it to be significant.
> video games
Cool. There is a very real chance that he will have more of those because they will be cheaper to make. He won’t be using the generative AIs, he will be consuming content made with them.
> my wife and I can enjoy retirement
Joe doesn’t have to worry about retirement. Someone will use a combination of these AI technologies to make his wife fall in love with a perfectly attentive, smoky voiced older guy. When this AI powered person suffers a terrible car accident on a business trip she sends a significant portion of their savings to him. When Joe finds out he immediately calls his bank. There an other AI powered agent handles his issue. It takes a while for Joe to be understood, because the agent he is interacting with is heavily biased towards trying to upsell Joe on a new mortage.
Eventually he is able to claw back some of the money, but the stress and the implied emotional infidelity ruins their mariage. He talks with the assistant of a divorce lawyer (another AI). She collects all the information from him and the lawyer (this time a real person, albeit one heavily supported by various AI systems) sends over all the paperwork. The AI of Joe’s lawyer agrees with the AI of his wife’s layer about the details and once that is done the humans sign the papers and they are divorced.
Joe still has some money left. He can rent a bungallow and maybe he can spend his retirement there, but unfortunately Joe picks up a nasty addiction to online porn. (What Joe doesn’t know that the booties he is looking at are generated exactly to his taste, as measured by his pattern of clicking on the free samples.) This is the last straw, the addiction sucks Joe’s wallet empty and he dies destitute. Many many people with generative AIs have Joe’s money now.
To his last breath Joe doesn’t really understand what this AI thing is everyone is talking about on the news.
It's not clear that Joe Sixpack even owns a computer from this description. Joe may not even have internet access -- just cable and a console. And there are probably a lot of folks in this bucket still, but it's categorically one that generative AI isn't personally useful for (though they may be affected by the tech indirectly.)
But for anyone who performs knowledge work on a computer, or has a question about an offbeat subject, or needs help learning a new skill (eg, Joe's daughter wants to know why a certain answer on the practice drivers' exam is wrong), or needs to improve written communication, or wants a summary of a complex topic, or needs help transforming text... a very large group of ordinary people can still benefit from this tech.
Your daughter can use the new learning tutor, based on generative AI, that helps with her coursework and learn new materials. It's like an expert tutor in a bunch of fields that she didn't have access to before -- at least not at a reasonable price.
Now your daughter has learned a lot more, has opened up a world of possibilities and this helps her get a job (or create a company) that helps her buy a new home.
Also for video games, they could use these generative AIs to create more immersive characters and worlds. Your video game experience just became much better -- especially if you're drinking while playing.
And if you play sports at a local level, generative AI can take in as input a bunch of rosters and play-by-play data (maybe eventually creating the play-by-play data directly from video) and being able to output stories about games. Today coverage of local and club sports is limited because of resources -- but if you could apply AI to this problem then you're local bowling league could almost be covered like the NFL on the web.
EDIT: And another thing -- which actually is something we started doing now. You have a personal medical assistant that you use with your doctor to ensure that your wife gets the help she needs with her current condition. Joe Sixpack is happy that it is much less likely that the doctor misses something "obvious".
>Your daughter can use the new learning tutor, based on generative AI, that helps with her coursework and learn new materials. It's like an expert tutor in a bunch of fields that she didn't have access to before -- at least not at a reasonable price.
Now your daughter has learned a lot more, has opened up a world of possibilities and this helps her get a job (or create a company) that helps her buy a new home.
Those two paragraphs look like they are in opposition to me. If a degree becomes that much easier to get with AI assistance, then everybody else is also using the same assistance, and then the jobs available to graduates in that degree have also become less valuable as companies no longer need to hire them and they start laying off people already in those jobs.
I mean, off the bat you might use it to replace Google, like bing is already doing.
And it doesn't have to solve a problem for you to make an impact on your life- it can make your life worse too. If your daughter is interested in writing, graphic design,or programming, well, finding a job and moving out by 30 might become a lot harder. Bing is already in use. Copilot is already in use. These are not small markets or use cases.
> I mean, off the bat you might use it to replace Google, like bing is already doing.
That's not for me. I gave it a try for a couple of days, but using ChatGPT as a search engine is much, much less useful to me than the old-fashioned method.
Bing was already in use before ChatGPT and Copilot is seen by most as an evolution of auto-complete. My last paragraph specifically said that I predict that the applications for generative AI will be in areas where we're already using ML. Search and auto-complete are two examples.
> Things I do for fun: play sports, video games and drink.
Video game NPCs will very quickly be replaced by LLms. No more boring scripted dialogue. This allows for a truly open world where the inhabitants can dynamically respond to your actions. Video games will become cheaper to create with generative AI that can quickly create a layout of a game world that can then be built on.
No more boring scripted dialogue. Now you get boring, procedurally generated dialog. About things that don’t matter, don’t make sense, or veer wayyyy off topic.
You fundamentally cannot make a random npc interesting because they are not supposed to be interesting. Ideally they say very little.
Agreed that LLMs, etc., will game development _cheaper_ by requiring less labor. It seems like software development in particular is will be getting a lot of powerful new tools over the next few years.
> Video game NPCs will very quickly be replaced by LLms. No more boring scripted dialogue.
I'm skeptical that this is what the users want. Sure, it would be nice to have, say, less repetitive background chatter in Skyrim. But, human-scripted dialog is intentional, which is at the core of a lot of gaming. Take that away and you end up with the early versions of No Man's Sky, where yes, there's an infinity of different variations to explore. But it wasn't what users actually wanted; they wanted a designed experience.
Sure, there are still scripted stories/quests and what not. But the background characters can become much more interesting if they're all LLMs that are just given a prompt like "you live in this cabin and are a subsistence farmer who has a dark secret" or something instead of just standing around looping a few lines. Open world games don't feel organic at all imo because these characters who should be adding flavor and making the game dynamic are just completely static.
I think whether or not it will actually be cheaper remains to be seen. Right now many AI products are still being heavily subsidized, thus the cheap or free price tag. Once these services decide they need to monetize, it may not be cost effective for most video games at scale. Maybe eventually these computations can (reasonably) take place on the client side, but I think that's so far away that we could very well see another paradigm shift by the time that's realized.
Crypto generated an insane amount of general public mindshare with zero marketing. I wouldn’t read too much into that as a signal. I do think the value prop is a lot more straightforward, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not mostly hype.
Disagree; I'd argue that the key distinction between generative AI and those other things (metaverse/crypto) is that the value of it is immediately apparent to almost anyone. There's a reason ChatGPT ended up becoming a household name with literally no marketing whatsoever.