Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that those technologies weren’t important. Blockchain, the whole crypto-sphere, impacts many many lives.
Similarly, Big Data, and its corollaries of maximized data collection and automated surveillance and profiling, impact pretty much everyone today.
I should have been more clear about the two things I think are different this time:
Generative AI is personal. I, normal internet user, can install them and use them myself. They expand my personal options. LLMs are great at transforming text, for example to explain it, break it down, or change speech registers. If you already know something, they can speed up your work massively in some parts. Image generators are more narrow in their application, but no less powerful.
The impact of Generative AI is felt immediately. How many years did it take for Blockchain to take off? It’s been less than a year since OpenAI released usable models to the public. Image generators only got good this year. Neither has as much impact on the world at large as some of the other buzz-word tech, but the impact is growing massively. ChatGPT is not only another tech fad, it had the quickest growing userbase in all of history, afaik.
The media are overhyping what generative AI can do. It is, for large part of the tech bro sphere, a buzz word without a lot of meaning. However, as a privacy enthusiast who followed the big surveillance leaks enabled by big data, and as a tech-interested person followed the news for a decade or so now, I have never seen something like this before. Once you look past the buzz around the word, I still consider it the tech advancement with the (probably) biggest direct impact I have witnessed yet.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that those technologies weren’t important. Blockchain, the whole crypto-sphere, impacts many many lives.
Similarly, Big Data, and its corollaries of maximized data collection and automated surveillance and profiling, impact pretty much everyone today.
I should have been more clear about the two things I think are different this time:
Generative AI is personal. I, normal internet user, can install them and use them myself. They expand my personal options. LLMs are great at transforming text, for example to explain it, break it down, or change speech registers. If you already know something, they can speed up your work massively in some parts. Image generators are more narrow in their application, but no less powerful.
The impact of Generative AI is felt immediately. How many years did it take for Blockchain to take off? It’s been less than a year since OpenAI released usable models to the public. Image generators only got good this year. Neither has as much impact on the world at large as some of the other buzz-word tech, but the impact is growing massively. ChatGPT is not only another tech fad, it had the quickest growing userbase in all of history, afaik.
The media are overhyping what generative AI can do. It is, for large part of the tech bro sphere, a buzz word without a lot of meaning. However, as a privacy enthusiast who followed the big surveillance leaks enabled by big data, and as a tech-interested person followed the news for a decade or so now, I have never seen something like this before. Once you look past the buzz around the word, I still consider it the tech advancement with the (probably) biggest direct impact I have witnessed yet.