Robert Solow, who The Nobel Prize-winning economist famously said in 1987 that you can see the computer revolution everywhere but in productivity statistics. I predict 2023 is the year that will finally change, thanks to artificial intelligence. By the end of 2023, AI will quickly become one of the most important factors of production in the global economy.
It is true that the history of AI is largely a history of frustration: the hype that entails the “AI winter,” in which both talent and funding give up discipline. But this time, thanks to the deep learning revolution, it’s really different.
In 2023, we will see ordinary people everywhere enjoying the power of AI right at their fingertips. What might this look like? Let’s say you need to create a marketing brochure for a new geographic area your company is in. Trained on a dataset of all the documents your company has ever created, your AI assistant generates three options for you within minutes—each beautifully written and illustrated. They’re still far from perfect, but what was once a weeklong project has turned into the work of a few hours.
That’s just one example, but the bottom line is that AI is on the verge of giving us all superpowers. You’ll have the ability to create an email or voice memo with your own (or anyone else’s) in seconds. You’ll be able to create realistic photo art—or even videos—with a few brief instructions. You’ll be able to answer arbitrary scientific questions by letting the AI ”read” an entire trove of academic literature. You will be able to entrust your books and accounts to an AI algorithm.
Some of this innovation will come from the usual suspects, like DeepMind and OpenAI. OpenAI has released betas of GPT-3 (a natural language generator) and DALL-E (generating images from text), but we can expect these tools to be widely available soon. However, it’s also interesting that there’s also a new generation of startups that are proving that you don’t need a billion-dollar budget to get to the top of AI. Take in the middle of the journey or Stable AIapplications that produce results that compete with DALL-E or Cause and Effect (disclosure: I’m an investor), allows scientists to find new causal relationships in the life sciences with natural language questions. Then there’s a growing list of new AI startups with impressive backers and more general ambitions, like mankind (an AI safety and research company), Guess (seeks to remove harmful elements such as racism from the AI) and Keen technologywas founded by computer science legend John Carmack.
This is not an artificial prediction overview intelligence, much less about AI “replacing” humans. However, it is hard to overstate the impact of freeing up billions of hours of human labor and making creativity and knowledge too cheap to measure. I fully expect this to unleash a huge wave of startups. Just as the advent of the internet gave every startup scalability allotment engine, the era of AI superpowers will give every startup massive scalability Quantity engine. Technology analyst Benedict Evans said in 2018 that one way of thinking about AI is that it’s like giving every company an infinite number of interns. In 2023, those interns will become world-class copywriters, illustrators, and more—be it scientists, data analysts, or even negotiators.
What would you build with a million such “interns” in the cloud, available on-demand, 24/7, and at near-zero marginal cost? In 2023, we can expect thousands of entrepreneurs to show us.
