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So, of course, in November of 2022, generative AI exploded on the scene. But I think it’s important to realize that artificial intelligence has been around for a lot longer and has gone through a very interesting and important evolution. Previously, artificial intelligence was mostly about analytics, the kinds of things that power your Netflix recommendations or your Amazon book selections. Largely, that’s been kind of invisible in some sense. But of course, then generative AI really changed everything. As the name indicates, it’s about generation. It’s about content generation. It’s about creativity. It’s about writing. And it’s really changed pretty fundamentally how I think virtually everybody doing white collar jobs is doing their work these days.
Now, of course, people were blown away by what generative AI was able to do. And then OpenAI released its first reasoning model. For the first time, AI was able to engage in a form of reasoning, right, known as chain of thought reasoning, thinking through things step by step in in a way that previous systems had been unable to do. And suddenly, it opens up a vast vista of possibility in areas like mathematics, problem solving, decision making.
Now the cutting edge is really evolving towards what’s known as agentic AI. Right? And that’s AI as agents. AI agents that basically chain together a bunch of AI processes, analytics, generative AI, reasoning AI into complete workflows that will do things like booking your next flight for your vacation or deciding what you need in your refrigerator to feed yourself for the next couple weeks. And this is really an important evolution because it begins to make AI very active in the world. And that’s where I see the future really going at this point. It’s in adaptive AI, which begins to learn in real time from what’s going on and begin to adapt its responses accordingly. And it’s in workflow oriented AI, which puts together and chains together multiple systems of different kinds to create powerful workflows.
But of course, as soon as you’ve got AI beginning to reason and then eventually make decisions, you’re on very interesting territory in terms of things like the privacy of data, the ability to control what these systems are doing, that it’ll start to become very good at influencing us, even misleading us. So it’s like so many things with AI. There’s these tremendous potential benefits on one side and some real serious concerns and risks on the other.