Remember the days of video clubs? With the huge cassettes (80s) and the queues from consumers? In the 90s it was DVD, while in 1997 Reed Hastings founded Netflix. A competitor to the internet-supported cassette or DVD rental. The problem was that there were no good connections.
I don't know if you remember how much the internet was misunderstood in the first place. Many felt that the impact of the new technology could be compared to that of a fax machine. At the root of these misunderstandings was the view of the Internet as a conservative innovation.
But there are also disruptive innovations, which rewrite the rules from scratch and unlock new possibilities. These new features are usually undervalued initially along with the products that incorporate them. But over time, new features – like not having to leave your home to order a DVD – gain enormous value, upsetting the establishment.
We all learned a lot from the 90s.
GPT-4 can now write code, diagnose medical problems, summarize scientific articles, translate foreign languages, create images and more. This is artificial general intelligence (AGI).
We now have the ability to embed intelligence into all of our applications. Current LLMs are like a smart undergraduate who has read every book in the world but has an attention span of only 10 seconds.
The most interesting applications of AI so far are those that do not treat AI as a stand-alone feature, but rather see it as a new substrate for structural features.
Well, how we think about AI matters. Commanding it to write us a text is a pretty tepid use of this technology. It is useful, yes, but remember that we have a student who has read every book in the world. The really interesting AI applications are those that are deeply embedded in the product and intelligently offered without even being asked for.
Using AI as a substrate upon which we can create is another. AI isn't a separate experience, it's just the product. It's not a feature, it unlocks features. If you're not building with AI, you should probably start doing so. And if you're currently building with AI, try building another Netflix.
