Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

AI has moved from interesting to actual work. This is much like the arrival of VisiCalc, which changed the home computer from hobby to actual work.

I was still in college the first time I saw an Apple computer. It was so new and odd that the Apple II just sort of sat in the corner of one of those odd stores that we used to have a block off campus. There was some sort of space game rolling on the TV screen attacked to a box that had a keyboard on it. Oh well.

Some of the computer science students had collected enough money to buy one or two of these Apple computers. I recall that the really good programmers didn’t bother with the Apple. The hobbyists who tinkered with this and that and looked at circuit boards but got Cs and Ds in the programming classes loved these things. Great hobbies for the lesser inclined.

Then, VisiCalc arrived in late 1979. Accountants raved about how this electronic spreadsheet saved them hours and hours of tedious drudgery associated with their jobs. With their jobs? Yes, with their jobs. The accountants bought that funny machine with an Apple on it because that’s what came with VisiCalc.

VisiCalc changed the home computer from an odd thing hobbyists played with to a necessity for accountants and others who wanted to move ahead by being much more productive.

And now with have ChatGPT et al. Nine months ago, the different AI research departments of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the other big tech were toiling away. They pre-published on arXiv and spoke at various conferences. The goal was to inch ahead of the other research labs on the standard benchmarks to achieve a new SOTA (state of the art) performance. Life was grand at these places. Good salaries. Independent work. Excellent facilities.

Then, almost by accident, some fella’s at OpenAI put ChatGPT on a website. Sign up for free and use this chat bot that held the world’s knowledge in it “memory banks” (an old term that us old folks used when we were much younger). Type a question just like you would ask a wise old person. Boom. There’s the answer. It would write an essay or an email or whatever you could imagine. The thing even wrote chunks of code in programming languages. Sure, it didn’t do everything, but it sure did a lot of things.

ChatGPT changed AI from an odd thing researchers played with to a necessity for everyone who wanted to move ahead by being much more productive.

AI had its VisiCalc moment. Right or wrong, for better or worse, expectations changed, and usage changed. It is no longer enough for AI researchers to work away in their labs to inch forward on standard benchmarks. We want a system that summarizes images and videos and tells us the meaning of the lyrics from Taylor Swift’s latest release and what she was wearing.

AI? Models? Benchmarks? The lesser inclined who are tinkering and not doing anything worthwhile can continue to tinker. The movers and shakers are spending $$$ on tools that move and shake them ahead.