Before people spoke words, we doodled pictures of mammoths on cave walls. Thirty thousand years later, we’re evolving again. For the first thirty years of its life, the Internet was a cave and we slapped pictures and text all over it. We’re moving to spoken word media. That doesn’t seem like a big deal. Bu it is. It was at the dawn of humanity. It is again.
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It seems that every week a major player in AI announces something massively new and unflinchingly important. This week, OpenAI showed us their “o” face. An omnichannel virtual assistant we can see and talk to. For some odd reason, they dropped the word “chat” and opted for GPT-4o to let us know we can talk to it and it talks back. Frankly, I think this would have been the moment to call it ChatGPT. But, hey what do I know, I don’t run a multi-billion-dollar company.
We’ve been texting with OpenAI for over a year. We talk to Siri and Alexa. They talk back. Adding voice to OpenAI seems like a pretty obvious next step.
I keep circling back to what happens to the Internet when we stop doodling? I think audio AI is going to kill the visual internet. We won’t need new webpages. We won’t see ads. If the message ain’t in the audio medium, it won’t be heard… discovered… consumed… Which means your media and your message better play in Peoria. And elsewhere. I’ve been banging this thematic drum for a while. So, this isn’t exactly excavating millennia-old ground.
My small-time brain gets bogged down in small-time ideas. For the big picture take, you need big-brained people. Like my friend, Judy. This AI stuff her fretful.
She remembers the beginning of the Internet. People thought it would reduce the cost to distribute information. Which led people to believe it would reduce the cost of business. Which led people to believe small companies could compete with bigger companies. She DM’d me, “100% FALSE.” She used the caps. She believes AI will be equally unpredictable.
Still, one thing is undeniable. The internet changed 1:many communications. Far more people create content. From lonely blog posters to video producers with mass followings. The supply of content is vast now. As consumers we have nearly infinite choice.
Judy is sussing out a big picture. The “AI is a black swan event.” It will evolve the current 1:many internet to a 1:1 medium. She points to Ted Chiang’s novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects about a bot that grows up.
She added that, “AI innovation will increase productivity unevenly. Bigger companies will get disproportionate benefits thus AI will further uneven the uneven playing field.”
It’s always a good idea to agree with smart people. I agree with her on two key points.
First, AI will take the mammoth amount of everything we have and multiply it by an endless number. Every article will have an infinite number of summaries. Every piece of code will be written and re-written for every specific application. Anything you can think of will be drawn for you, said for you, turned into a movie for you. Nearly instantly, with fewer people, and with much lower production costs.
Second, companies that don’t have a 1:1 plan built around AI may find themselves chiseling stick figures on the hunt while AI-powered companies are omnichanneling with virtual assistants in the next era.
And, yet, still no flying cars or conveyor belts that get me ready in the morning.