This Francois Ler track is great to play in the background as you read today’s edition
Fifteen weeks ago, when I started this newsletter, GPT-4 was just making a guest appearance in Bing. Now, we've seen the rise and fall of Bing's Sydney experiment, the official release of GPT-4, Google's debut of the undercooked BARD 1, and now Google's full-fledged integration of LLM AIs across its product suite. Those that are paying attention are witnessing a lightning speed evolution of technology.
So, what does all this mean? Well, let's peer into our Future Telescope and find out!
1. Blink And You’ll Miss It
After rumors of Google going into Code Red due to the rise of tools like ChatGPT, it has now come out with its own slew of AI enhancements across its product suite.
There’s Search Experiments like the “Search Generative Experience” which will give you AI generated answers to your search queries on Google. There’s “Sidekick” which will get integrated in the Google Workspace, similar to Microsoft’s Copilot for Office.
And hey, before you forget, Google was already ahead of the curve by allowing you to search for photos of specific scenarios like “sunset” or “dog” way back in 2015! Like I’ve been saying since I started this newsletter, you can’t underestimate Google in the AI game.
These AI announcements by Google signal an era where technology enhances human capability exponentially. By weaving AI into familiar tools like Google Docs and Google Search in a more thoughtful way than does Microsoft, Google is showing its unique product design capabilities. As Sundar Pichai said on the Decoder podcast, product design is Google’s strength.
And they will continue to build on this strength with the recent merger of Deepmind with Google Brain bringing the best AI research and AI product design teams in the world together.
With AI optimizing conversations, composing music and boosting creativity through writing aids, people will achieve more. These incremental improvements to word processors and search engines will result in a generation of 10 year olds better equipped to solve complex problems.
2. Regulation Nation
And then there's Sam Altman's engagement with the United States Congress. Altman, the head of OpenAI, has been in talks with Congress about the potential and threat of AI.
Now, I want you to pause and think about this.
How often have we seen regulators respond to a new technology this quickly? Not often, right? This should signal the disruptive and transformative nature of generative AI technology to all of us.
Regulators are usually the slow movers, the tortoises in the race. But in this case, they've turned into hares, trying to stay ahead of the AI wave. This isn't just another blip on the tech radar. This is a seismic shift in our society, and our regulators know it.
3. IRL
But let's not forget, this is just the beginning of humanity’s technological journey. After all, we just got the light bulb 144 years ago, the television 96 years ago, the electronic computer 80 years ago, and the internet just 40 years ago. The iPhone is barely 15 years old. All this advancement for a species that has been around for more than 300000 years, and it makes you think.
If you think about this path of technology, we're still in the early stages of what AI can do. Like the invention of the bicycle didn't render our feet obsolete, the advent of AI doesn't mean the end of human ingenuity. Instead, it's another tool, another method of transportation to carry us to new destinations.
We're living in a world where we're seeing the future being shaped in real time. And that's an exciting place to be. We're not just spectators; we're part of this change. We're the ones who will shape how AI develops and how it's used.
So, as we look to the future, let's remember that we're not just passive observers. Let us be active participants in this beautiful new world.
That’s all I have for the fifteenth draft, see you next week!
Very interesting