Garlic bread, it's the future

Last week I was doing a small AI job. Only a short job but fun all the same. AI really is amazing and it got me thinking about when I first started out in the web business back in 1997.

Yes, I got my first web job 26 years ago. At the time I was a full-on evangelist I thought the web was great, even though it was really basic back then. I remember the early adopters and those setting up web businesses were banging on about how the web was going to change the world, and while there may have been a few bumps along the way it did indeed change the world as we know it.

The arrival of AI promises to be another massive game changer of similar if not greater magnitude. AI is going to change everything, but not in the way any of us think.

AI and the ideas behind it have been around for ages. When I was doing my PhD back in the early 90s I was sharing an office with a guy who was doing a PhD in neural networks. I remember thinking that we would have AI by the year 2000. It didn't work out as I had hoped. Though we did see some remarkable advances over the years, 2011, IBM’s Watson, won "Jeopardy!", then in 2016, Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated world champion Lee Sedol in the game of Go.

The mid-2010s saw virtual assistants like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google Assistant becoming household names. These systems utilized natural language processing and machine learning to provide personalized assistance to users. Though I think they still fall short, I tend not to use Alexa because I find it annoying, same with Siri and Google Assistant. Self-drive cars are not here just yet, although Tesla's FSD V12 looks to be talking a good fight.

In recent years, AI has continued to evolve rapidly, AI algorithms have become more sophisticated, capable of learning with less supervision and handling more complex tasks. But there is still a way to go.

It seems to me though that all of the uses of AI so far have had little to do with most people. Autonomous vehicles are not so advanced that all cabbies and lorry drivers are out of a job, although I think that it will happen. The use of AI in industry, although growing, has been mostly hidden from the general populace.

For me, chatGPT is a big step because it is something that is accessible to everyone. I don't mean cost-wise, I mean that anyone can get some use from it. While it is not perfect, chatGPT and similar products are of use to people in just about every profession. If you work on a computer then there is some benefit you can gain from products like Bing, Bard, chatGPT, Gemini, and so on.

Every business should be thinking about how they are going to take advantage of AI as it stands right now, today. They need to get at least one business person (and 1 techie) spending some real time researching what it can do for their business. If you watch the demos of AI you are going to see some mindblowing stuff, the latest from Google, Gemini is just amazing, but what businesses should be trying to figure out, is how it can benefit their business right now.

AI and it's full business potential is beyond the imagination of almost everyone at this time. It is going to be the ultimate disruptor. But just like the web of 26 years ago most people, including me, don't know how, we just know that it will change everything. When I first started, Facebook, Google, Amazon were unknown, which makes you wonder what companies are going to develop in the next 5-10 years that are going to surpass the current champions.

Last week I downloaded some LLMs onto my local machine. This is just a regular (by today's standards) pc and I can run them on my local box. Granted I can only run 2 at a time due to memory constraints, but even so. I have LLMs running on my local machine that I can start to tweak as I desire! I've been creating my own GPTs on chatGPT, and playing around with the open AI on Azure. All of it is just mind-blowing. but what can we do with all this amazing tech?

I remember when intranets started to take off, web technology for internal use only. They have been massive in industry. So, one use for 2024 is AI alongside the corporate intranet. Lots and lots of companies bringing LLMs internally, setting up their own servers and tweaking an LLM for company use only. I think that has the potential right now to produce a massive bang for the buck in most organizations.

We shall see.

One final thing, I thought I'd add an AI disclaimer at this point. I still write my own posts, including this one. So if the writing is shit it is not AI's fault, it is mine!

Bryan.

p.s. would AI have come up with that title?