Smartphones or AI?

During my lifetime? Well, I was born in 1987 which means that the Internet and personal computer were already a thing. I think thus far the most impactful invention since I was born would probably be the smartphone. Everybody has one, even in developing nations people are getting them. For a lot of people, it’s the sole means by which they access the internet. It’s a versatile tool that has innumerable functions. Without it, it feels like one is missing their left arm.

That’s until about a little over a year ago. I think the next biggest invention will turn out to be artificial intelligence. Within just a few months of being released, ChatGPT reached over 100 million users which is astronomical. Now with Google making leaps and bounds with Bard, the competition has definitely increased so I expect for us to see quite a bit of improvement over the next year or two. All of this while people continue to incorporate it into their daily lives.

People are already using it for their jobs, but I can see many people using it in their daily lives. Especially when it gets integrated into the personal assistants on phones which the companies are working very fast on. Websites and apps are beginning to utilize it to help their customers find the right products more efficiently. And I think we’re just scratching the surface of what it can do.

This is just speaking of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Bard. There are a lot of companies that are trying to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which would be leaps and bounds more advanced than LLMs. The primary difference between LLMs and AGI is that LLMs use language and text to convey information while AGI is broad-spectrum knowledge. I think that multi-modal LLMs are a step in that direction but not the exact solution that we’re looking for.

I think the next decade is going to bring a whirlwind of advancements in this area and when we look back 10 years from now, we’re going to be astonished at all the changes. Or, I could be wrong and it could be a dud. That would be unfortunate. We’ll see, I suppose.