AI tip of the week:
Dona was in the Denmark AI Conference last week. Most sessions were in Danish – which she doesn’t speak. To participate, she used the Microsoft Translator app (set to Danish -> English) to pick up the talks and translate them in real time. She also took pics of the text-heavy slides and uploaded them to the Translator app to learn what they were in English. Try it today – it works decently well! Tell us how it works for you / how you used it!
A big question we get when we talk to business leaders is, “This AI business – is it nonsense or real?”
To which we answer, “yes.”
We’ve all heard claims of what AI can do. Much of this is unproven….BUT there are some really useful scenarios as well.
The next question we hear is is…”Okay, will this whole AI thing stick around…given we’ve wasted so much time on nonsense fads in the past?”
GREAT question!
Let’s take a look at some recent fads:
Remember Amazon Alexa? Loads of articles calling Amazon the king of innovation. All the things you could do with Alexa. Set an alarm. Buy things on Amazon ofc. Alexa was going to change the world!
How many of you use your Alexa daily and can’t live without it? Exactly. [For the record, Jeremiah does, but he is an edge case, not like most people. Pls forget we mentioned him.]
What about Segways? Remember those two-wheeled wonders? They were going to take over the world! Ok – now name the last time you’ve seen ANYONE on a Segway who wasn’t in a movie about mall cops, or maybe a tourist exploring Barcelona wearing a bright pink helmet with fuzzy rabbit ears. Fad city.
Don’t get us started on NFTs. We still don’t know what that is.
AR/VR/MR? Did you see that guy wearing an Apple Vision Pro headset while driving his Tesla down the street? Just, why. He was pulled over by the police. Thank you, police.
Sigh. It’s just one of those painful facts, that tech can be cool and AT THE SAME TIME totally NOT useful to normal people.
So – why can’t we have nice things? All that clickbait, that’s why.
Today’s question is is AI any different?
Surprise, surprise, we have a framework.
To figure out whether a new tech will be around in a few years, we look at five factors:
- Does the new tech have a obvious consumer or commercial benefit?
- Is it low cost to try out?
- Is it easy for devs to build on?
- Is it already integrated into existing life?
- Is the form factor natural?
Let’s run a few innovations through our framework.
iPhone – Easy to use. Kind-of expensive to try. The App Store was a game-changer for devs. We could get our biz ideas into the hands of customers all over the world, without having to get them to our website to download our software. The form factor was familiar – everyone was already playing Snake on Nokia flip phones before the iPhone came out. Let’s give it a 4.5/5.
AR/MR/VR (Augmented reality / mixed reality / virtual reality) – This is a totally different ball game. It is a cool tech demo, but not really a mainstream use case. It’s high cost to buy. It’s complicated and expensive to build on it as a dev. AND you look like a fool putting these things on your head. (2/5)
Alexa – Obvious consumer benefit. There are so many use cases – you can play music, get perfume-making ingredients. But – it’s a bizarre form factor. You have folks yelling into a speaker. And pretty much no dev we know has built on it for years, if ever. (3/5)
NFTs/BitCoin/Web3.0 – Pros: catchy name? Cons: we’re still not really sure what this is. Hard pass. (0/5)
ChatGPT/Copilot/GenAI. Finally! Lots of good here. Clear scenarios for consumer & commercial. It’s very low-cost (often free) to try. We’re starting to see it built into products – things we use daily, like search, Word, and email. It’s straightforward for folks to pick up – the whole world is now used to typing into a text box. Building on it is fairly easy for devs. And, you don’t look AS stupid using it. There are some cons, of course. Prompting is hard and not intuitive – and you HAVE TO CHECK YOUR ANSWERS. (4.5/5)
Using this measuring system, you can see that Gen AI has more in common with the iPhone than the other fads. This gives all the signs of something graduating from Hype to Realty.
We don’t agree that AI will replace every job on the planet but we do agree that AI will augment many jobs.
Until next time, friends!
<3 Dona & Jeremiah