AI emerging from the shadows – Friend or Foe?

Over the past week, I have found myself in repeated conversations about AI and large language models… it seems like interest in it continues to grow at pace, expanding beyond ChatGPT to other models and uses too.

The rate of development in this AI space, with new products coming to market attention, is just astounding – and far from being big tech only, open source models, able to run on PCs (soon phones?), are already being discussed – it does feel a genie has just been let out its the bottle.

I haven’t really felt this level of excitement for a while. Not maybe since the dawn of the internet or the mobile smartphone… there is a sense of massive opportunity, that new things are possible and a potential to make life better, mixed with the uncertainty of change.

It’s as if we’re standing on the precipice of a new era.

And, just like a universal Swiss Army Knife, does AI-LLM have the potential to be the fix all, providing solutions to many of the problems we face today? (modern day problems that is, rather than real problems… although maybe it can help with some of these too?)

Comedy – the last frontier?

Adoption is clearly on the rise – Notice more use of emojis on LinkedIn posts – ChatGPT; Smoother to the point headlines – ChatGPT; Waffling a bit in generalities – ChatGPT; Not making sense explaining a complex concept (and making a joke of it) – nope this is me!

Comedy aside… For those in creative spaces, this new technology is an incredible time-saver and let’s be frank about it… once you have started to use it, it is incredibly hard to stop.

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Debates over use

All this fast adoption has also ignited lots of debate.

  • Should we call a halt to development and introduce more controls?
  • Is this the end of society as we know it?

Some concerns do seem valid… the thought of this type of AI interacting with itself, between models, creating its own prompts, and continuously improving is unsettling.

Likewise, that they have not yet been connected to large-scale systems in this form, for now, also seems a blessing.

However, we can no longer unsee what we have seen, and having seen its potential, my view is that it is now going to be incredibly hard to put away… it is really a little too late.

It is now out there, in the wild and we are going to have to adapt… As a result, there will be business implications and not all necessarily positive.

Changing business models

By way of example, over recent years many companies have poured immense time, effort and resources into the development of new tools and techniques for process improvement.

These, often bespoke, solutions and business models, as suddenly starting to seem clunky and expensive, when I can develop something similar, with the same output all for a fraction of the cost with my general ‘swiss army knife’ GPT approach.

Just in the same way that no one buys a digital camera or a flashlight anymore (we just use our smartphones) – it has the potential to fundamentally change the business, and societal, landscape.

Try to keep up

With such a pace of change, if you’re not using it now, or at least understanding how it’s used, there is the potential to fall behind.

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It is fast becoming pervasive, is quite thrilling to observe, and helping in part to unleash new levels of creativity – in volume rather than quality at least!

It is all exciting to watch closely, to see where the journey leads us. Hopefully, it will end in a better place than before… which if you look at history of previous cycles (PC, internet, smartphone) I do have some optimism about..:)

Time to now head off for a quick game of Candy Crush… have a good week everyone.


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