Confession of an AI pessimist
When Bob Noyce invented "integrated circuits(IC)", one concern among his colleagues at Fairchild-Semiconductors was, who would even consider buying such an expensive invention. However, 3 days later the market came quite literally to them, when the USSR's Sputnik Satellite(also the world's first) passed over their head, kicking off "The Space Race" and now integrated circuit was to be used in the Apollo mission, they put men on the moon and developed everything electronic moving forward. Your, mine and everyone's life depends on that moment when market-case for ICs was developed. Today we are at a similar crossroads.
Apollo Space Program was one of the most consequential organized human efforts (like the Manhattan Project) at the base of it like many other efforts it was driven by innate human emotions of "Fear" and "Territorialism".
I have been cynical and somewhat held a pessimistic view on recent AI hype specifically concerning phasing out a Job or disrupting the industry in a major way, but events of the last few days have forced me to change my upheld view and all of this due to that cute support animal Kangaroo video. I was surprised that despite what prevalent belief in Gen-Z/Millenials about their parents falling for DeepFakes, most of them were not able to realize that the video was AI-generated.
I have long held a belief that you can never predict the future, and most predictions are BS. Especially, related to anything "AI", which has historically suffered multiple AI Winters (period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research happened in 70s, early 90s) and up-till when I first picked learning DL in 2017 I had this cynical belief that maybe we'll, see another AI winter. But, that cute little mammal has me believing that we aren't far away from the first feature film release scripted by humans but entirely generated by AI. This is somewhat analogous to the time Walt Disney did when he started presenting his cartoon characters as short films, the animated cartoon character was something alien to most cinema lovers and within a few decades, we became accustomed to it. We are going to experience something revolutionary on the same scale here.
From the time of the Romans, theatrics have been an integral part of empires, Ancient Indian "Natya Shastra" is recognized as the foundational text of theatre here dating back to 15 BCE maybe even earlier. They have been part of the narrative building and propagation of important stories that change the course of power. Now, Imagine getting a tool that gives you high ROI both in terms of materialistic gains and nation's power projections(mainly due to "Fear" and "Territorialism"), even a cynical technically averse leader would be willing to put in resources, human lust for power has moved mountains before, don't be surprised if this mountain of "technical limitations in scaling AI disappears"(space race cost 200 billion$(at today's inflation) that's cheaper to returns we could be getting within a few more LLM releases).
One of the most common characteristics of all previous AI winters was not breaking the ceiling of usability, as of now we have crossed that ceiling.
One of the men I deeply admire Charlie Munger used to regret losing out on Google, he gave the example of how in the early days of Google, one of Berkshire's holding GEICO Insurance got the best ROI(Return on investment) in advertising using Google Ads. In the current day and age any form of "Generative AI" will be the greatest ROI both in terms of power projection by nation-states and material gain for any organization.
Buckle up people, just a few days back pessimist in me, would have cringed in saying this but AI is going to change most occupations as we know it. That too in a matter of very few decades.