Insights on the Explosion of AI (with a little help from some of my friends!).

Like many technologies that have been around for many years (sometimes decades) before they take off at scale seemingly overnight, AI has been with us for awhile now. However, of late the sector has blown wide open and AI’s time has come in full force and momentum – especially during the past several months. 

My own experience of AI began in earnest about seven years ago when the founder of Humtap, Tamer Rashad, and I connected. Humtap’s generative AI technology enabled non-musicians to create an original song that could be used as a soundtrack bed under any video in seconds by simply humming or tapping a beat – the AI would do the rest. There have been several other ventures in the generative AI space for music in the intervening years, including Google’s Magenta (Music ML), Amper Music, Jukedeck (acquired by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance), Jukebox from OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT), and AIMI, among others.

Late-breaking news this week finds the artist Grimes offering to split royalties on any popular AI-generated songs that use her voice 50/50. She’s interested in being a pioneer, a trailblazer, and trying new things.

Beyond music, AI has become a key factor across a plethora of sectors and use cases including retail, travel, financial fraud monitoring, supply chain management, medical imaging and diagnostics, customer service, and much more – especially where there’s a need for computationally intensive processing and machine learning at scale. As a major disruptive technology, it’s got the potential to impact virtually everything.

I’m sometimes referred to as a futurist or visionary because I’ve built a career out of being at the leading edge of digital change and innovation – imagining possibilities for technology often years before they become adopted as mainstream. And I’m not alone! I have several very bright colleagues who fit that same description, and recently each of them have written and spoken about their visions for the impact of AI on our world. I’d like to spotlight and share some of the great insights these brilliant minds have conveyed.

First there’s Rob Tercek, who has been entrenched in launching new products and services in digital media, and changing consumer habits at scale for decades with many “firsts” to his name and experience. Rob just launched his newsletter entitled “The Owner’s Guide to the Future” which I highly recommend.  He ALSO just released a 30-page report called “The Deep Weirdness of Artificial Intelligence” which is his attempt to sort through the chaos and confusion, the frenzy and fear-mongering about AI; this is a must-read report!

Then there’s my friend Dr Pippa Malmgren, who is a noted economist, was an advisor to Pres George Bush, and a sought after speaker, author and thought leader. She did a terrific 4-min guest spot on Fox Business in December 2022 with her insights on trends with AI in which she shared some great insights and stats. One of her observations was that while ChatGPT (and its ilk) are fantastic for heavy computer processing demands, no matter how advanced they get “I don’t think we’ll find something more powerful than the human brain”. In the Fox spot, Pippa also recommends viewers read “Scary Smart” a book by one of the Google X leaders, Mo Gawdat that takes about the future of AI and our role in how to engage with it. I’ve ordered my copy.

And yet another long-time colleague is Jay Samit, who has been a wildly successful entrepreneur, leader and change agent in the digital media world with too many achievements to list in brief. Visit his site to learn more. Jay wears many hats as a renaissance man, including having authored two best-selling books the most recent being “Future-Proofing You” which I deem required reading. There’s a chapter in Jay’s book entitled “The Trillion-Dollar Opportunity” in which he shares his insights on AI and the Spatial Web which is spot on.

My pal Peter Csathy is another long-time entrepreneur, attorney, thought leader and advisor in media and tech like myself who is also a prolific author and podcaster. He shares forward-thinking insights regularly through his two newsletters, Fearless Media (focus on innovation in entertainment, media & tech) and AI & NFT Legal Update & Litigation Scorecard. For the latter, he did a terrific special AI issue just last week which was chockful of timely key developments in the space, and trends that we all need to be paying attention to.

Last but not least, is Peter Diamandis, who wears many hats as a major thought leader on innovation, as Chair/CEO of the X Prize Foundation, Vice-Chair & Co-Founder of Human Longevity, and Co-founder & Exec Chair of Singularity University.  Peter hosts a podcast and writes a tech blog that comes out about 2x/week that he refers to as ‘data-driven optimism’. The very latest issue focuses on four reasons why AI is exploding now including: computational power, massive amount of labeled data (to train large language models), de-monetized training costs which has plummeted over 99% in the past 5 years (!), and massive investments. In 2021 corporations invested $160B in AI, by 2030 the global AI market is projected to be worth $1.6T. And we saw ChatGPT go from 0 to 100 million users in just two months -- which is absolutely astounding.

If you want a real crash course on all things AI from some of the brightest minds in the business (and where it’s all heading next), you owe it to yourself to check out the links I’ve shared on the works of my esteemed colleagues above – and to stay tuned in to what they’re talking about and predicting. Things are moving faster than ever, and it’s really important to stay informed as things continue to evolve. Watch this space!