Google officially announced their ChatGPT competitor (named Bard A.I.) today. Many people have known that Google has been investing significantly in AI for many years now, much enhanced by their acquisition of Deepmind in 2014. I will be eagerly awaiting their release, which will initially come out as a 'light-weight' version to help scale to the millions of users that will likely test out the product on its debut.
We've made significant strides in A.I. in the last twelve months, with companies like OpenAI, Stability AI, Lensa, Google, and more making breakthroughs and headlines across many different industries. As the access to 'AI and AI tools' becomes easier and cheaper in the coming months and years, the main thing I'd like to think about is what companies and people will be doing to adapt to this.
Over the last few months, I see a lot of startups trying to hop onto the 'AI train' and try to incorporate AI as a feature or product to their underlying business, yet this novelty will soon wear off as the access to AI will become as omnipresent as using an online search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or anything else. In reality, a lot of companies are offering AI by just implementing an API from companies like OpenAI and trying to rebrand themselves now as an "AI company. Well as I'd like to say: "You're not an AI company because you added the OpenAI API code into your product, just as you're not a fintech company for adding the Stripe API into your checkout pages."
A more important skill in the coming future will be the ability to speak to AI. Some companies are already starting to hire for positions like these, calling this newly created position an "AI prompt engineer" for now. Since access to AI is no longer the bottleneck, one key differentiator that will arise is how you interact with the AI. The best companies will focus more and more on building a collection of prompts that are the most useful for their use cases, persona, and business. This will require a lot of trial and error, along with a good understanding of how the business works, and how the AI model understands human speech.
Data will be another core differentiator for businesses going forward. If everyone is utilizing the same AI models that were trained on the same data, things will quickly start looking and sounding the same. To prevent this, I foresee a lot of companies building a proprietary database of information that sets their AI models apart from others. This can potentially give better insights that no one else is able to get without the same data, or generate more rich content for their users.
However things play out in the coming future, I will be interested in seeing how companies, organizations, governments, and people evolve to deal with the oncoming advances in AI across all industries.