The Race to Generative A.I.

The Venture Capitalists and Professors are taking notice.

Hey Futurists,

With wired calling Generative A.I. “limitless creativity” and a16z proclaiming Generative A.I. saying ‘art isn’t dead it’s just machine generated’, I really have to wonder.

One thing I will admit is Microsoft likely has an unfair advantage in this game and GPT-4 is hotly anticipated. Just look at what OpenAI is funding.

Venture Capital is doing a fair job at proclaiming Generative A.I. is the next big trend, even as skeptics abound. I don’t know about you, but I think I fall somewhere in the balanced middle.

According to Base10.VC:

The AI platform shift, led by generative AI, will create as much value as the cloud platform shift, completely changing the broader knowledge economy and getting us closer to unlocking the potential of The World’s Brain.

That’s probably not true, but it’s a fun story to cover! The TAM of Generative A.I. is actually rather small in the early 2020s but I think it can lead to some fairly interesting startups and products.

Tracking the startups, the trends and the news is what my Newsletter A.I. Supremacy is all about.

Base10 Says Generative A.I. Is a Major Knowledge Economy Shift

A Cambrian explosion? Software 3.0, guys these are just human based prompts. It will take years for them to be useful in code, gaming, tools and video. If not decades to find mainstream adoption.

Do you like extremely long-form articles on A.I? I started a very occasional Newsletter here.

We haven’t entered an era of limitless creativity yet via A.I. but we are seeing some pretty limitless hype around Generative A.I. Hype like advertising sells on the internet and I understand there are some pretty serious incentives by Venture Capital and creators to take this approach without regards for journalistic integrity or talking about the pros and cons.

I’m trying to balance my coverage around the hype vs. some of the A.I. ethics concerns. I really hope that comes across in my work which amounts to mostly curation, synthesis and identifying trends.

The way we describe what Generative A.I. is going to change, maybe each quarter from now on. From images to code, tools, video, music and gaming. It’s inevitable now.

What is Generative AI

Generative AI is a category of machine learning where computers can generate original new content in response to prompts from the user. Today text and images are the most mature applications of this technology, but there is work underway in virtually every creative domain, from animation, to sound effects, to music, to even creating virtual characters with fully fleshed out personalities.

It’s my pleasure to try to unpack the noise from the reality and summarize the incredible companies in the space. Microsoft and Google are at the head of the pack in their ability to integrate this into their software, products and revenue streams. And rapid consolidation in the space could occur in a winner-takes-all framework of how BigTech has been left to become dominant monopolies in the U.S.

Scott Galloway in his latest No Mercy No Malice Newsletter covered A.I. and it’s an important warning:

Lately tech has been about failures. How technology has failed us. The more sober assessment is that humans are failing tech.

From Robotaxis to the Metaverse to crypto we have created unrealistic expectations for the promises of emerging tech. You could make an argument we are about to do the same thing with Generative A.I, Quantum computing and Software 3.0 generally speaking.

I myself would like to debate with a digital clone of Scott Galloway, and with generative-AI, I’ll likely soon be able to do so. I make some stunning revelations about what industries could benefit the most from Generative A.I. below in this argile.