At the point where everything that could possibly be said about Q4’s ChatGPT was said, we welcomed the arrival of a significantly upgraded GPT-4 a couple of weeks ago. Much like its predecessor, it is marvellous…but more so.
There has been a step-change in progress with Generative AI/at OpenAI and we are at the very beginning of its deployment in our lives, professional and personal.
Where once we had to wait years for upgrades (it was almost 2 years between the release of DALL-E and ChatGPT) we now wait months. The feeling is similar to the journey of mobile apps: in the early days updates were rare. Compare that with today where it seems as though apps deploy updates on the hour.
With some dust settled we’re starting to see a number of very-real use cases for what OpenAI have been working on and one of those is your own, personal, AI.
It’s no secret that the best science fiction novels are often prophetic in some important ways. While we don’t have Harrison Fords tracking down runaway robots today, we do have a very active debate about how to police and regulate artificial intelligence. That’s something that Philip K. Dick presaged accurately in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book that Blade Runner was based on.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer has similar merit, though superior IMHO. Once you muscle through the bewildering array of novel vernacular in Gibson’s world (here’s a glossary - FYI it’s where the term “matrix” comes from) the reader is enveloped in a cyberpunk world where the wealthy have multiple strong AIs acting on their behalf with names such as Wintermute and Neuromancer.
When I read the book it was the first time that I’d come across AIs referred to as a proper noun or a potential product that someone might buy for a specific purpose. Up until that point I’d always come across artificial intelligence talked about conceptually as an abstract noun.
Owing to the recent advances in conversational, generative AI we’ll soon be naming our own personal AIs. Bill Gates, in his recent blog, said it brilliantly:
Advances in AI will enable the creation of [a] digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with…
….You’ll be able to use natural language to have this agent help you with scheduling, communications, and e-commerce, and it will work across all your devices.
…Eventually your main way of controlling a computer will no longer be pointing and clicking or tapping on menus and dialogue boxes. Instead, you’ll be able to write a request in plain English.
This will be a battleground. Plenty of startups will act as “wrappers” over GPT (or Google’s BARD, etc.) looking to provide you with a personal/executive assistant, friend, mentor, analyst, therapist, doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc.
The best wrappers, assuming that they can lay claim to relevance and performance over the medium-to-long term, will be luxuries. They will be priced accordingly. Time to start saving.
Why does this matter if you’re buying, selling or running a small business? For decades non-tech SMEs have (very) slowly grappled with an increasingly digital world. Competitive advantage has been earned by those who have embraced innovations.
Take for example two businesses: one who has a CRM and one who does not. Perhaps the one who doesn’t sleeps well at night knowing that their artisan approach has merit. Meanwhile the one that does have a CRM likely has a framework for communicating with customers and alignment between employees/teams over any given contact at any given client. The one using technology clearly has an advantage.
The same will be true for AI and AIs. The businesses who empower and equip their employees best to learn about, accommodate and synthesise advances in AI into workflow processes will outcompete. That’s true for big businesses right though to one-man-bands. It’s a question of productivity and about spending time doing tasks which require human minds and opposable thumbs vs. doing something that software can do better than you or I.
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NB
Thanks to Nathan Benaich at
for the nudge to read Bill Gates' recent blog post. Gates' blog post is a 15 minute read but well worth clicking through and having a skim, at least.If you’re interested in all things AI, Nathan is one of the relatively few leading lights here in the UK so go ahead and sign up to his Substack.