Episode 8: The Golden Age of AI

So I looked this turn up just to see if I was using it right.
You know how sometimes you hear a term or a turn phrase or whatever over and over again?
You might use it, you might hear it a lot, whatever, and then it turns out that the actual origin of that phrase is something totally different,
and the way it really should be used is something totally different?
Anyway, I believe that we're in a golden age of AI.
So I looked up the phrase golden age.
It has its history in Greek mythology.
Of course it does. Why wouldn't it?
Then later on down the road, it really, during the Renaissance, becomes a term for an age of art and culture and enrichment and those sorts of things.
Usually looking backwards.
It's usually looking nostalgically backwards to look at a time period from before where almost with rose-colored glasses,
you're kind of looking at it and saying, oh, it was the golden age of whatever.
Fast forward a little bit into more modern use.
What it means at this point, it can be used in the present, right?
You can say we're in a golden age of whatever.
And what it's really referring to is that as we fast forward in time, as we move forward in time,
people will look back at whatever this time period is and say, you know, that was the pinnacle.
That was the pinnacle of whatever.
So, back to my statement.
I believe we are in a golden age right now of AI.
Probably not exactly a hot take.
It's all the rage to talk about AI, of course.
The topic is everywhere.
It's on everybody's mind, especially in the technology and business worlds and all.
Education.
Pretty much any professional industry.
Let me get pedantic for just a minute here.
I have a real issue.
I shouldn't say it that way.
It's not like I'm out in the streets protesting, right?
But I do take issue with everybody referring to this wave, this current wave of technological advances as AI, quote unquote AI.
And right now, just to set the context in case there's whatever future listeners.
Right now, the last two years has really been, ChatGPT was released, ChatGPT and similar types of both generative and LLM-based AI has really come into it, into fruition and into the cultural zeitgeist and into everybody's everyday life.
So this is the period that I'm talking about right now.
And I have an issue with calling this.
Everyone just saying, oh, AI, AI, AI.
AI is an umbrella term.
It covers many, many things.
It covers things that we have done in the past as well.
It covers machine learning, which has been around for a long time.
It covers generative things.
It covers LLMs.
It covers many, many, many things.
But we're all just running around saying, AI, AI, AI.
Well, what most people actually mean is this latest rendition of things.
And then they specifically mean as LLMs.
Anyway, again, just kind of a pedantic aside.
I've long held this parallel in my head or metaphor or, I don't know, parable, whatever you want to call it.
Carl Jung, earlier big name in psychology, had a theory of the collective unconscious.
And what the collective unconscious was or is, is this sort of shared experience that through the generations,
people have developed this unconscious mind that they all share deep, deep down through generations and generations of just being people.
And this is put up as evidence of how there are common archetypes as you move from culture to culture,
common values, common shared belief sets, even with two completely disparate societies or completely disparate cultures.
There are certain shared things.
There are certain shared knowledge.
There's no number of other examples of this sort of thing.
It's all a little woo-woo.
It's all a little out there, to be honest.
But I always thought it was a really interesting theory.
And I always held, I have said for a long time that to me, the internet and particularly the web is our collective unconscious.
It has knowledge from across cultures and across people and across sets of ideas.
And all, you know, the ability to tap into that, which, you know, historically has largely been through things like Google.
Our ability to tap into that gives us a window into an unconscious mind that we all share as a culture.
What's fascinating about LLMs is that it does this, it takes this to the next level.
It gives us a new way to conversationally interact with a cross-cultural, cross-societal, cross-time, unconscious mind
that is the culmination of all of this knowledge and information and opinions and history and everything else
that we as a species have put together.
And it gives us a very direct and conversational way to talk, to interact with that information.
Now, you can say what you want about whether or not, and we'll just use OpenAI, the, you know, producers of ChatGPT.
We'll just use them as an example.
You can say what you want about whether or not it was right or wrong or indifferent, that
they essentially collected all this information and turn it into models without the express
permission of the creators.
We can talk about content ownership.
We can talk about ownership of generated content from AI.
None of that is really the purpose of this conversation.
But those are things worth talking about, just not for this particular discussion.
But insofar as they have done that, it has already been, they've already done this, right?
They already went out, indexed all the information that they could, brought it together into a model
and turned it into this really wonderful interface, which is in its simplicity.
It's a text box.
You type whatever you want into it.
You can ask it questions.
You can talk to it, whatever.
What you are really speaking with is the collected experience of the entire internet age and beyond.
So, golden age.
Why?
In theory, these things should just get more powerful, right?
They are refining models.
They're getting more and more intelligent, so to speak, more and more robust.
So, why is right now the golden age?
It reminds me of a time period that I would consider sort of, I'm going to use it loosely,
but the golden age of social media slash the golden age of sort of what we used to call Web 2.0.
It was a time when companies like, let's talk, you know, Twitter was on the rise.
Facebook still had some of this.
They had APIs that were exposed where any everyday developer could create things using the information that they could find within their application.
And these things were free of charge, generally speaking, or very small fees.
You could do whatever you want with them.
It was kind of use at your own risk.
But it was kind of a time of shared and open information out of what later down the road became walled, closed-off gardens.
I think that this is a similar time period for LLMs and for AI.
Right now, it's very simple and it's very transparent.
Again, we'll just talk about ChatGPT at the moment.
You can use it, first of all, for free.
You can step up and pay a little bit of money, 20 bucks a month to get a more robust model, a little, you know, faster performance, better model, all that kind of stuff.
But it's simple.
It hasn't been walled off yet.
And it will become that way.
Mark my words.
Because now, every other company that is responsible for creating and maintaining content now knows what they have on their hands.
And they're going to hold that closer to the vest than they used to.
And once these companies start walling off their own gardens and making their own models or their own AI versions or whatever, and they start charging one another to make models from their content or whatever it is they're going to need in the future,
It's going to lock things down, increase prices, and reduce overall – transparency is not quite the word – but overall crossing of information and crossing of boundaries.
Further, we are still in a phase where the advertisers have not yet gotten a hold of these things.
And mark my words, they will.
It will not be long, I don't think, before when you come to a ChatGPT window or you come to a Claude window or whatever the system of, you know, the moment ends up being later, you'll be staring at sponsored content, advertisements.
Maybe you have to pay to get away from that.
Maybe the model itself is laden with advertising content.
Maybe advertisers make their way – there's new strategies that make their way into the AI where they are literally a piece of it that you cannot break away from.
And I think that that's likely what will happen.
I don't know.
I'll call it two to five years.
We will be staring at a very different interface, one that has largely been decimated compared to what it is now.
Right now, we have these models that we're essentially trained without permission across a whole wide array of things.
Are they perfect?
Absolutely not.
They have tons and tons of problems with them.
However, it is a great time to be able to go in there and interact with something that can really truly enrich you as a person.
So what are you doing with AI right now?
If you're not doing anything or if you're holding out based on some sort of principle or you believe about content management rights or whatever, I think you will look back at that later and regret it.
I think two to five years from now, this ecosystem will be worse for your everyday person, for your everyday person, consumer, whatever you want to call it.
It will not be the way it is now.
Now it's simple.
Now it's clean.
Again, it has flaws.
But when in history have you been able to so easily and conversationally talk to something about topics you know nothing about without judgment, without worrying about whether or not you're even asking the right questions?
Well, you can – if you're clever about it, you can get it to help you ask the right questions.
It's a great time to be enriching yourself as a person using this technology.
I am not saying it's the be-all, end-all of what this will become.
But I am saying that I think we're in a golden age of this.
An age of culture and enrichment and art that will slowly be corrupted or maybe quickly be corrupted over time as more and more companies lock down, begin trying to focus more on profit, begin trying to focus more on how to squeeze every last piece out of their consumer.
It's a good time.
It's a good time to be doing something cool with this.
So what are you doing?
I hope you're doing something great.
If you're not, I really suggest trying to make it part of your everyday workflow.
It's really – it's a great time to be doing this for yourself to enrich yourself using what's really an incredible new technology regardless of how misnamed and flawed it might be.