The AI Opportunity

While I think that AI is over-hyped, I do believe that most business opportunities in the next 10 years will be related to AI.  AI is a new technology similar to the Web, and will develop similarly to how the Web developed.  New companies that take advantage of AI in substantive practical ways, not based on hype, will be valuable.

This week I learned the OpenAI API.  This is the programming side of AI.  But the main skill needed for AI is how to talk to AI to get it to do what you want.  Most users of AI will be passive, like asking ChatGPT how to make an omelette.  Only a few people will develop the skill of knowing how to command AI to do exactly what they want.  The valuable businesses will combine this skill with programming to make useful software.

I have a business where I want to use AI.  I can handle the programming side of this.  I will also try the talking to AI side, but I have no advantage over anyone else here.  If anyone is interested in learning this skill, they are welcome to join me on working on this.  You don't need to know programming but you do need basic technical skills.  And in fact the first 3 chapters of my reactionary programming course cover exactly what you need.  Let me know if you are interested in this.

I am actually looking into this myself. My idea involves Spatial computing/Virtual reality /metaverse /gaming development connecting with AI/Machine Learning models for immersive user experiences

I have been thinking about what AI (specifically, large language models) is good for. LLMs are good at understanding text (hence why they are good at translating) so they should be good at doing things like take a paragraph of text and summarizing it in an easy to process format.

For example, turning things like "my name is Bob and I am 50 years old" into:

Name: Bob
Age: 50

I can see this as being useful for controlling things with a large number of parameters. If there are so many parameters that it would be overwhelming to the user, then it may be more user friendly to hide the parameters from the user and let him control things through the LLM. The config settings for chrome and Firefox come to mind.

At first I thought AI might be useful for software deployment, but you would still have to be knowledgeable about deployment (if you don't want to accidentally break something on your computer), and if you are knowledgeable about deployment then you probably don't need the AI.