Thoughts on Generative AI

Future Talk #1 - Thoughts on Generative AI :

This is part of my future-talk series that I am starting to write about all things future Tech!

I have heard a lot about Generative AI in the last couple of months and almost all of them focus on the short term benefits and the issues they bring to Humanity. I think many forget that Gen AI is not a thing that happened suddenly but was in the making since the age of the transformers(Published in 2017 as part of the research paper - Attention is All You Need by Vaswani et al.). Google missed the boat on this and it is going to come back to haunt them while OpenAI and Microsoft reap the benefits of it. In any case, the biggest short term benefit of Gen AI is not in the technology it enables but empty sales pitch that many software companies use to promise extra ordinary claims and sell vapourware with little or no regard to the data that these LLMs used to train on and the lack of attributions those companies are giving to the real humans who created those data.

I don’t even like the word AI being used in this context (of Generative AI) as it exaggerates the claim that a sophisticated statistical model that has the capability to be trained on vast amounts of data by Reinforced Learning from Human Feedback, that can accurately predict the next word in a sentence can be considered as Intelligence, Artificial or other! It is a far stretch…

Maybe we can call them Assistive Intelligence instead?