Are we entering a third wave of AI?
The AI podcast of Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs might be a sign that the third wave is well underway
Something curious happened recently on my Twitter feed.
Some big tech investors and entrepreneurs started to get snarky with web31 developers and builders. They were saying, “the guys in web3 just discovered AI.”
I assumed this meant that they saw many web3 builders saw something new about AI and switched to work on those projects and businesses.
This was strange to me. Didn’t the web3 people know about AI already? In my world, AI is an established thing. AGI is an established field with plenty of hype and progress (Go, Alpha Fold, self-driving cars, NLP)2 and the underlying algorithms. And Practical AI is an established part of the enterprise community.
Who needed to discover it? There must be something different going on.
It clicked with me yesterday when I listened to a recent My First Million podcast on “…The 2022 A.I. Gold Rush….”
This is an entrepreneurship podcast with a focus on tech. But they don’t know the enterprise space and have never seriously talked about AI.
But, they are deep in the web3 and cryptocurrency community.
Listening to this episode was like watching this community wake up to AI. But, the AI they were waking up to was different from the AGI and Practical AI work I had seen. The AI that excited them was in content creation— drawing pictures, writing emails and texts, or even generating podcast interviews.
They started talking about the AI-generated interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs on podcast.ai.
The Jobs podcast could be a wake-up if you haven’t followed the AI field. Even if you are following it, it is still pretty cool.
(I listened to the podcast. It was good, not great. Some of the things said were a bit weird— but I wouldn’t have noticed if I didn’t know it was AI-generated. And Steve Jobs did most of the talking, so it was barely an interview. But it was still very cool. I learned a lot about the wisdom and ideas of Steve Jobs.)
In addition to the Jobs interview, they talked about DALL-E3 and Stable Diffusion (for drawing images), Runway (for making better images of your products), Interior.ai (for uploading pictures of your room and getting design ideas), Jasper (for writing blog posts and other content— whoops, there goes my blog hobby!), and many other examples.
After listening to all these new applications, I can see why a new wave of people are now excited about AI. This area of AI for content creation is not just for large enterprises and deep pockets. It is for everyday consumers, small businesses, and existing content creators.
This is why it feels like a new wave. We have AGI, Practical AI, and now Content AI.
I don’t know how Content AI wave will impact enterprise solutions, but we should think creatively and keep our eye on this wave.
web3 is based on the ideas of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs, and the idea that this will create an entirely new way of interacting online. A knock against this is that the actual use cases have been slow in coming. The crash of the NFT market didn’t help.
It is fair to debate if we are getting any closer to AGI. Even if you are very skeptical, the algorithms coming out of this work seem to have many practical use cases.
I’ve used a few DALL-E images for this site (including the picture in this post). I also create custom images for texts for friends and family!
Hello Mike:
Very thoughtful podcast with eye-open insights and developments around "creative AI" or "right-brain AI" as the author calls it.
I expect implications of a lot of sorts around this: ethical (is an AI company for a kid better than a real buddy to combat loneliness?), legal (copyrights issues for creating your "own" music or art while piggybacking on work of accomplished musicians or artist), and may others. As it usually happens, regulation is always "catching up" with technology around these issues so I foresee a lot of discussion around this.
By the way, would love to hear a Nicola Tesla -- Elon Musk interview, maybe Tesla could sue him for using his name without paying royalties :).
Thanks for sharing, as always, very interesting content....