Happy Sunday and welcome to InsideAI! I'm Rob May, and this is the last commentary I'll write for the newsletter, and the next to last newsletter. My last actual newsletter will be later this month and I'll include some favorite old posts and talk about what I'm up to next. You can follow me going forward at Investing in AI, where I'll write less frequently, but still enough to be worth the read.
I've thought a lot about what to write for this final commentary. I've decided to explain a little bit about "why AI." I sold my first startup in December 2014 and I looked around at what might be next. I considered 4 areas: Blockchain, IoT, Corporate Messaging, and AI. I read the original bitcoin paper, and a bunch of blockchain writings and ultimately didn't get it. It sounded like a slow consensus based way to build software would have limited uses. I thought IoT sounded great - lots of stuff will be connected to the internet and it will be massive but, I didn't really know what to build to enable that. I decided on Corporate Messaging (Slack was young) and a friend and I built a new internal email/chat tool and once we started using it... well we realized it sucked and we hadn't solved the problem we set out to solve. So I decided to make the next phase of my career focused on AI.
After almost seven years of writing regularly about it, working on 2 AI related startups, and investing in over 100 more, I'm glad it's where I ended up because I believe AI is just getting started. Why? Because AI is going to lead to a phase shift in productivity once it is rolled out at more scale.
This PDF on the impact of technologies on economic growth has an interesting chart on page 6 that highlights how various technological revolutions from the printing press through the internet have impacted economic growth, primarily via increased productivity. The results are awesome. And from what I see as an entrepreneur and investor in these early AI technologies, the best of AI is still to come.
Think about this, as impressive as AI is with tools like OpenAI's new chatbot, I think there is still a long way to go to get to real machine intelligence. I agree with Nassim Taleb that what we are currently seeing is cool but is just verbalism. We still have a ways to go to move to real reasoning and thought but we are making rapid progress and I don't see it being that far away.
As we get there, AI is going to have an impact on the economy that is greater than any technology that has come before it. While the printing press enabled expanded knowledge and the industrial revolution enabled physical work to scale, the internet enabled communication and learning to scale, and now AI is going to allow "thinking" to scale.
There is a lot of skepticism in areas of AI and much of it is valid, but I believe it is only near-term valid. Dalle-2 and Stable Diffusion have given us ideas of what is possible, and in coming years as these types of tools scale into new areas, the results are going to be remarkable. It's an exciting time and I'm glad to have shared the last few years with you on this exploratory AI journey. I hope you will follow me over at Investing In AI, and later this month, I'll sign off with some of my favorite old posts.
Thanks for reading.
@robmay
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