Ride or Wipe Out: The AI/ML Disruption Wave
I’m here to tell you that the AI/ML tidal wave is bearing down on all of us. Our businesses, our livelihoods, our professions, are all at risk.
What tools like ChatGPT (and other GPT derivatives) have shown is that even with today’s nascent and limited capabilities of GPT/LLMs outdo what many humans are capable of doing in a small fraction of the time and cost. Creative writing, concept art, business plans, on-demand stock photos, schedule planners, answer tech support questions, etc. Many dismiss the concern because these tools aren’t perfect and sometimes they make hilarious mistakes. But this is where we are even though these models have only been deployed for a year or two. And GPT-4-powered ChatGPT has been proven to be able to produce accurate, highly optimized code from a given spec.
And to re-emphasize, this is happening NOW.
I have been part of all the tech disruptions in the last 30 years. I was building websites in 1994, e-commerce in 1996 (I even got a few paid gigs while in high school doing these), the dot-com explosion (and subsequent implosion), the “web 2.0” disruption, the age of full-stack frameworks (.net, Rails, Django, etc.), front-end frameworks, JS => ECMA => TypeScript, machines => virtualization => cloud => containerization => orchestration and so forth. What these have in common is the fact that each subsequent adoption wave has been shorter and shorter. I remember in ’94 most business still being blissfully oblivious about the Internet. It wasn’t util late ’98 that they began seeing the opportunity and many didn’t adopt it until the early 2000s. Compare that containerization and Kubernetes. In late 2016 K8s was seen as an experimental/ “new shinny thing” by late 2018 many of the Fortune 100 had already adopted it or were adopting it. And since then it has become “table stakes” for any infrastructure plans.
The AI/ML tidal wave will put that adoption curve to shame, in my opinion. Your business, your profession, your livelihood is on notice. With this disruptive wave, you do not have the luxury of waiting for early adopters to work out the kinks and figure out the value proposition — period.
The paragraphs above might come across as scary or doomsaying — and I suppose it is if you do nothing — , but on the contrary it’s a message of a great opportunity. I believe AI/ML will change humanity in ways we can’t even fathom in the next 3–5 years, but doesn’t have to be in a negative way. Think in the ways AI/ML can already lower the barriers of entry to start a new business. To materialize your concepts and ideas. To give you super powers that would have required a small army of people a mere 2–3 years ago. Business analysis, accounting, customer leads, content creation, etc. are all doable today by one person leveraging AI tooling. In 3 years, it’s quite possible — in fact, I expect — the tooling will be so good to the point of obsoleting startups with more than 4–5 people and mostly obviating the need for VC funding. From idea to commercialization in weeks, not months or years. This will be the most disruptive, risky, scary, promising and fun technology wave we will likely witness in our lifetimes.
