4 interesting links for Jan 9 2023
Apple AI audiobook narration; AI is transforming our world and no one knows about it; a collection of AI tools; AI is the lever for productivity growth
You have probably noticed, if you’re a regular reader of this Substack, that I have become quite interested in AI. The claim that it will be a foundational technology over the next decade or two seems valid to me. I expect it to have a profound effect on society. Following are four interesting links I’ve come across in recent days about AI and its anticipated effect on our world.
Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooks
I can’t say that I’ve ever liked audiobooks or understood their appeal. They’re very low bandwidth, relative to the speed with which one can read. I am frequently told that people listen to audiobooks while they are driving or doing the dishes. Personally, I’d rather listen to jazz or blues while doing chores or driving, but to each his own.
You can listen to a sample of one of Apple’s AI voices, dubbed Madison, here. The voice has the timbre, pitch, and cadence that you would expect of a human voice. But Apple says it’s AI.
There is the concern that AI will take people’s jobs. But AI-powered coding tools like GitHub Copilot seem to make programmers more productive. Copilot is a complement to, not a replacement for, humans. If anything, demand for programmers is as high as it has ever been.
However, Apple’s announcement seems qualitatively different: if an AI voice can “read” an audiobook as well as a human can, what role is there for human voiceover artists? I suspect that we will quickly come to find that, at least for this particular job, there is no longer any role for humans.
Artificial intelligence is transforming our world—it is on all of us to make sure that it goes well
My intuition is that most people don’t know much of anything about AI. Ask them about ChatGPT, and they may say that they have heard of it. But most people are uninterested. They’re busy with their lives. This is unfortunate, because it is clear to anyone who is paying attention that AI is having, and will continue to have, profound effects on society. And those who are able to use AI tools, whether for good or bad, stand to benefit the most.
This article proposes three main reasons why most people are not paying attention to developments in AI:
[T]he first reason we might not take the prospect [of advanced AI] seriously [is]: it is easy to underestimate the speed at which technology can change the world.
The second reason why it is difficult to take the possibility of transformative AI – potentially even AI as intelligent as humans – seriously is that it is an idea that we first heard in the cinema. It is not surprising that for many of us, the first reaction to a scenario in which machines have human-like capabilities is the same as if you had asked us to take seriously a future in which vampires, werewolves, or zombies roam the planet.
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The third reason why it is difficult to take this prospect seriously is by failing to see that powerful AI could lead to very large changes.
If you are at all skeptical about AI—if you think the hype is unwarranted—it is easy enough to point to any of these three reasons, or all of them, as justification for your skepticism. It’s easier to be a skeptic, or a pessimist, than to contemplate a technology which could upend the world as we have come to understand it.
There are some people, heavily involved in AI research, who think that its development portends rapid and fundamental changes to society, for which we are largely unprepared and about which we are generally uninformed. For a long exploration of how advancements in AI could profoundly affect our world, I highly recommend Holden Karnofsky’s “most important century” series.
The question of whether ours is humanity’s most important century will, I think, come to the fore, as AI technology develops rapidly over the next decade or so.
This is a collection of some of the hundreds of generative AI tools that have been created over the past year. One reason that this list is so interesting, aside from the utility of having all of these tools in one handy list, is that it shows the barriers to entry in the generative AI tooling space are low, and that competition is fierce. It’s hard to have a compelling investment thesis.
Because the user interface for generative AI is simple—a web browser—customer acquisition has proven easy, and ChatGPT acquired more than one million users in the first week it was publicly available. As I put it on Twitter:
Easy user acquisition sounds like a great problem to have, but when every AI tool finds it easy to acquire users, then no tool has a moat.
Add to this the very real possibility of significant declines in the cost of AI compute over the next several years, and the barriers to entry in the AI tooling space seem very low. Consider this piece from Rob May:
The key position investors seem to be taking is that “context layers” that take these generative tools and put them into some point solution of a workflow is the place to make a bet. They believe the big tech companies will own the foundation models and so, contextual layers on top of those models that enable workflows like copywriting or image editing or whatever is the way to go. Dozens of generative media point solutions are getting funded.
My opinion is that these business models are not defensible for two reasons. First, there will be too many players because the barriers to entry are low and that drives a competitive dynamic that is unfavorable to investors. Second, they risk competition with the foundation models themselves as those models improve.
So, when I see a page like FutureTools collecting hundreds of different generative AI tools in one place, I can only conclude that the market is very competitive, barriers to entry are low, and investment in the space is hard, if not impossible.
And the gears begin to turn once again…
Ethan Mollick speculates that the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT may augur a long-awaited increase in productivity:
Even without knowing the cause, there is something that might change the trajectory of productivity growth, and, if you have been reading this Substack, you will already guess that I am referring to generative AI. While the full dimensions of the value of this sort of AI system are unclear, early indications are that it can act as a shortcut for many different kinds of tasks. Many aspects of white collar and managerial work have been unchanged for years, involving lots of time on Excel or Powerpoint or Micosoft Word creating reports and documents, using tools that have been fundamentally unchanged for decades. AI offers the possibility of changing the nature of this work in a widespread and lasting way. Documents can be prepared quickly, designs can be rapidly prototyped, slide decks can be generated with a few clicks, and more. The old constraints on managerial work might change very quickly.
His post is admittedly speculative, but if we assume that it is directionally correct, we can quickly see how the world may change significantly over the coming decade. I mentioned Holden Karnofsky’s “most important century” series earlier in this post. His thesis, which complements Mollick’s post, is:
The long-run future is radically unfamiliar. Enough advances in technology could lead to a long-lasting, galaxy-wide civilization that could be a radical utopia, dystopia, or anything in between.
The long-run future could come much faster than we think, due to a possible AI-driven productivity explosion.
The relevant kind of AI looks like it will be developed this century—making this century the one that will initiate, and have the opportunity to shape, a future galaxy-wide civilization.
These claims seem too “wild” to take seriously. But there are a lot of reasons to think that we live in a wild time, and should be ready for anything.
We, the people living in this century, have the chance to have a huge impact on huge numbers of people to come—if we can make sense of the situation enough to find helpful actions. But right now, we aren’t ready for this.
AI warrants paying attention to because it is a set of technologies which, if prognostications prove accurate, will affect society as profoundly and the internet and electricity did in past eras. As Mollick explains in his pieces, productivity has slowed in recent decades. The rise of a fundamentally new, and general, technology, like artificial intelligence may well be the very thing we need to improve productivity.