ChatGPT certainly put AI in the public imagination
in the nineteenth In the last century, electricity was the primary technology driving innovation, but it was not put into practice with inventions such as the light bulb and the telephone spurring the public’s imagination. With the release of ChatGPT last year, it sparked what some industry experts believe to be a light moment for artificial intelligence as the benefit of the technology became apparent to people outside the tech field.
Stephen Wolfram, computer scientist, physicist and founder and CEO at Wolfram Alpha, is one of those people who see the current situation a lot like the 19th century when electricity was powered in practical ways that had a tangible impact on ordinary people.
“We think of computing as an enabling technology,” he said last month in an interview at MIT’s Imagination in Action conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “In the distant past, electricity was an enabling technology that a lot of people were interested in…and the analogy I thought of with ChatGPT is something like the first phone that actually worked. People knew in principle that there had to be ways to humanize electricity.” To be useful for human communication. People have been trying for a long time.”
That moment came in 1877 when Alexander Graham Bell started the Bell Telephone Company as a business entity selling telephones and transforming human communications.
Peter Levine, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, sees the current state of AI as an “aha moment” and, as with electrification, one that has taken some time to develop into practical applications. “People have been working on this for a long time. It’s been polished for a long time, which makes it really interesting, maybe in the same way that electricity was. And this is the first time a light bulb has ever been on the street. People are like, ‘Wow, it’s Understood”.
Wolfram noted that the strength of this approach lies in the language user interface, which gives us the ability to interact directly with the AI. He said, “We’ve been able to take what’s on the web, in books and so forth, and have something that takes all that text and is able to produce plausible human script (in reaction)”.
This could have a profound impact on enterprise software going forward, and it’s something every startup working on product development today needs to consider. According to Levine, AI will be table stakes for every company from now on.
“AI is going to be a property of every application going forward, and that’s the moment when that starts to happen, where a database or operating system is part of every application today, I think AI is going to be a property of every application,” he said. This could change the way we think about how apps work and how we interact with them.
Not so fast
Vishal Sikka, CEO and founder at Vanai Systems, a MLOps startup, and former CEO of Infosy, thinks it’s a little more complicated than that, especially for enterprise companies. He believes we may not be in business right now, and it may take longer than we think for this technology to be mainstreamed within companies, especially in mission-critical applications.