The battle lines in the business in AI are going to get sharper and sharper, with clear divisions between individual users and enterprise customers, with a further division within enterprise customers. While Anthropic is a principally enterprise focused company, OpenAI, Gemini are targeting both individuals and enterprise customers.
We live in a culture which celebrates quantity against quality and is indifferent to origin. The desire for popularity, mass acceptance, career mobility and prestige and the hope of a short public memory forces people to find ‘short cuts’. An entire industry of ‘research papers’ literally opens the path to plagiarism.
There is a continuing debate on ethics and AI. It is probably a premature debate because we have not even succeeded in addressing the serious and sustained problem of the lack of transparency and misuse for personal gain in contemporary information technology, especially as it is used in markets. The number and scale of recent scandals in crypto has put paid to the assumption that technology will usher in transparency. If anything, the contrary appears to be the stronger probability. The misuse of systems, any system, is not a new phenomenon.
Trillions of dollars in business are an alluring prospect in the AI products/platforms space, which will attract billions in investment. Throwing money is not going to fetch results. Just as it happened in the early stages of telecommunications, which was a huge learning for everyone including and especially the companies and governments – because everybody got it wrong – the AI market too will force interested parties to think carefully before plunging. Clinging to entrenched notions could be a path to disaster.
While there is tremendous enthusiasm for the use of AI, the question for makers of AI is when it will begin to fetch profits, which begs another question – when will users be ready in large numbers to pay for the use of AI agents/products?
There is an intensifying obsession in businesses with automation, aided and abetted by AI, which is so overpowering that it has displaced from the public sphere all else, displaying a poverty of thinking through. Since it is clearly not a phase, the sooner businesses realise the folly of such narrow thinking, the better it will be. Will they?
We don’t have to dramatically alter our educational system for AI as is being argued by many because there is no dearth of educational materials on subjects such as Linear Algebra, Calculus, Probability and Statistics, which, however, can be and are studied even without any reference to AI. And the same goes for language too. We need to reorient the study of these subjects from the perspective of AI and build also a new generation of teachers. It is vital that we apply our minds to this if we do not wish this endeavour to go the way of so many Edtech companies
What a relief! Humanity is safe from AI! AI is not going to take over humanity. For a simple reason.
There is a business to be built, actually businesses, competition to be ridiculed and quashed, new products to be launched, new names to be thought of (no more LLMs – Meta), pricing to be perfected, investments to be carefully planned. With so many practical things to be accomplished, where is the time to take over humanity?
It is now beyond doubt that there are multiple players in the field of ‘artificial intelligence’ focused on leveraging the hype that they have themselves created to cash in on attracting investment. The lifeline of the world of IT and computing (of which something called AI is a part) is data centres (using the plural as singular), and the lifeline of data centres in power supply, which explains the continuous search for power efficient locations. And, of course, for fresh investment.
Relationships matter, in life and among data. And, just as in life, we need to steer clear off spurious relationships and stay invested with the genuine. Both take a lot of effort and thinking. It gets more challenging with data because of the multiple ways in which it is captured and the multiple formats and databases in which it is stored.
An ai start-up, once valued at $1.5 billion, has just filed for bankruptcy after allegedly falsifying its records for several years, inflating revenues. Will the madness ever stop? Doubtful
One of the greatest minds ever, Claude Shannon, deserves wider recognition than he has been accorded. His insights, relying on just two papers he wrote – one in 1948 and another in 1950, show remarkable prescience.
