I have a new article up at Discourse making the case for “The Spectacular Promise of Artificial Intelligence.” This topic has caught a lot of attention recently with the release for public testing of a new generation of AI chatbots, especially OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is able to create plausible (though often hilariously incorrect) English sentences on a wide variety of topics.
I used to do freelance accounting. One of my clients was a company that was using AI to write mundane stories about sports games and scores. Yahoo! had licensed their technology and was using it to populate stories on its website. This was back in 2012/13. AI writing whole stories about mundane topics has been with us for longer than one might realize. And don't get me started on those "Chat with us now" customer service chats you see on some websites. If you're on a well-funded company's website the chances are high that the "person" chatting back is an AI bot and it's been that way for some time.
The story now is that the new generation of AI has been developed as open source, and the open source AIs are starting to surpass the proprietary ones in quality of output. Meaning, anyone can, for free, download the code and use it. Now, we don't need to pay to license my former client's proprietary software. With a little knowhow, anyone can use AI.
The Automation of Automation
I used to do freelance accounting. One of my clients was a company that was using AI to write mundane stories about sports games and scores. Yahoo! had licensed their technology and was using it to populate stories on its website. This was back in 2012/13. AI writing whole stories about mundane topics has been with us for longer than one might realize. And don't get me started on those "Chat with us now" customer service chats you see on some websites. If you're on a well-funded company's website the chances are high that the "person" chatting back is an AI bot and it's been that way for some time.
The story now is that the new generation of AI has been developed as open source, and the open source AIs are starting to surpass the proprietary ones in quality of output. Meaning, anyone can, for free, download the code and use it. Now, we don't need to pay to license my former client's proprietary software. With a little knowhow, anyone can use AI.