We’ve just stepped over the precipice. This time is different.
AI will now move faster than just about any previous change driver and it’s a genie that’s simply not going back into the bottle. It’s best to get your head around it and to get on top of it if you can!
By now you all know about ChatGPT. You’ve probably already had a play with it and had your wow moment. Some of you might even be using it now to summarise huge swaths of information or to produce written content or stories. It’s pretty great.
You might also have had a play with DALL-E or Midjourney to create stunning images (like the image in for this post) from simple text prompts. Again the more avid of you might have been prototyping new logo ideas or producing illustrations for your new book. That’s great too. Mind-blowing even.
These things alone and as they are, are already demonstrating the ability to impact lives and industries. Rapid articles & storytelling, rapid content creation, rapid prototyping. They are just a glimpse of what’s to come and there’s now inexorable pace. Midjourney 5 just launched, ChatGPT-5 should be out before the end of the year, etc. It’s almost the definition of an exponential technology, meaning that it will move FAST.
Beyond the rapid iteration, access is also largely democratised given that access to Microsoft’s Bing chat and Bing image creators is free. These models are being released into Office, into Slack, into Canva. Phone apps are popping up, open source versions are proliferating (that’ll be another post!). They are hitting scale and are doing it rapidly.
The bleeding edge of this right now, though, is in attaching AI models to services and also to each other. In this way the chat systems can really ‘do things’ like analyse & visualise data (look up ‘ChatGPT code interpreter’), book flights, write code, book restaurants, scrape & summarise web content, or even create & book whole travel itineraries.
Bing and ChatGPT are in the process of rolling out their first plugins, and there’s an open source software framework called LangChain that’s specifically designed to mesh models and services into useful applications. So, these models that you’ve seen are very quickly moving away from simply being fancy chatbots and there will soon be an explosion of new services and applications that could only have been dreamt of, even just a year ago.