Good morning, Exchange crew! This installment will be brief because I have to finish prepping for today’s TechCrunch Live with Arianna Huffington of Thrive Global and Mamoon Hamid of Kleiner Perkins. Since we scheduled the conversation, a few things have happened, so I need to retool my notes and questions.
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The tech-narrative whiplash is actually what I want to talk about this morning. Now that the initial shock waves of the Silicon Valley Bank crisis have seemingly settled, tech news has reverted to type. If you read TechCrunch today, you can find meal delivery startups, chip news, funding rounds and a lot of AI news. Call it a return to industry optimism, even if the ground underneath the positive vibes is still a bit shaky.
The AI bit, though, has me utterly captivated. The more I read into recent advancements in the AI world, the more it appears that the tools that consumers and tech folks are playing with are not gimmicks sitting atop little substance, but instead lots of substance with some gimmicks resting on top.
By that, I mean that the consumer-popular stuff like using ChatGPT to, say, power the narrative for your next Crusader Kings run-through or having similar tools write silly song lyrics seems not to be the core innovation; what is underneath the consumer-friendly stuff is the real deal.
A lot is going on at once. From the recent release of large language model GPT-4 to the popularity and rapid rollout of new AI-powered search tools to companies like Quora and Duolingo finding ways to leverage the tech, we’re seeing both the speedy development of AI tech and quick commercialization.
The current product wave is probably just getting started. Forbes covered a massive funding round at Adept, to pick an example, an AI company that is building a tool that I have thought about for ages: centralized AI functions that help across applications. From the Forbes piece:
Chatbots rule the day in AI for now, but soon, Adept cofounder David Luan predicts, AI won’t just display unsettlingly human responses to typed queries, it will execute them. It will do what you would do with your computer for you. Granted such technology is still years away, but the speed of innovation in the AI space means we’re talking about two to three years, according to Luan — not decades. [ … ]
Practically speaking, Adept’s ACT-1 displays as an overlay window on top of existing software like Google Chrome or Salesforce. A prototype is ready for desktop, but Luan said it will also be available on mobile in the future.
That’s incredible. My early view that LLMs could be used to save tools like Siri from being largely useless appears to have been too small a hope.
Now let’s take the AI thing a bit further. By now, you have likely seen tweets from folks using LLMs to write code. This appears to kinda work — not to mention tools like Github Copilot — in its current form. But string together a few things at once, and you’re getting somewhere special:
- LLMs like GPT-4 are tools that anyone can use and get value from; evidence for this comes from their massive and seemingly sticky popularity.
- Companies, including startups, are working to bake today’s AI tools into products and services, some of which appear to be more operating system-level than stuck in the application layer.
- The same tech appears to be increasingly competent at writing code that it could, in theory, execute if given the proper tooling.
The rendezvous of our three bullet points is a computing system that can do more than answer queries — it can help build things. If simple development tasks can be handled by AI, then we can effectively treat software development in many cases as disposable instead of catastrophically expensive. (I presume in this view that LLM output can be translated into action, which I think is a small leap at the moment.)
Your computer is going to get a lot smarter and more useful in the coming years. At this point, the operating system of the future is probably the one that manages to get as much AI power into it as quickly and safely as possible so that everyday folks are supercharged in their abilities. It could be as big a step-change in our output and capabilities as the internet. And I say that as someone who is terminally online.
Adept is working on something along these lines, sure, but if Apple and Microsoft aren’t as well, they are in danger. I reckon that we’ll see a lot happen this year and the next as we gear up for a real shift in how we approach data synthesis and what the average computer user can do. Here’s to the future.
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