…that it will ever be. I am sure you have heard this or read this sentence already a million times – but it is and stays true. Especially with the still heavy investments (check out Nvidia’s latest reports) as well as news cycle around new LLMs almost every week. I normally try to avoid Mr Musk and especially his Twitter news, but this one around X.AI is remarkable and again underpins the ongoing enthusiasm and sentiment.
Gen AI continues to grow in an unprecedented pace – a market that is approximated at $6.5 Billion this year and forecasted to hit $141 Billion by 2033. And yes, it must be said that there is a lot of hype in the market and not all investments will pay off (in the short term) – especially in the consumer space. Let’s wait and see how Copilot+ from Microsoft develops, let’s look at Apple Intelligence and not forget Google Gemini. But Gen AI today has already major achievements in the business world, especially in specialized domains.
But what about your and my day-to-day work-life?
Well, this is where I think we need to consider an evolution and also need to be patient. Not everything that we want can be done already today by Gen AI, and not everything that it can do or is used for today is a good example and experience. Gen AI still has it’s flaws (of course hallucination, but not only) but also its current boundaries (how can it be used explainably and without bias). It is though not the today we should judge but its future – and as I have stated a few times already, I believe that Gen AI is different to be judged than Blockchain or the Metaverse as it has significantly more applications than the latter two.
Think about an evolution
When it comes to Gen AI we need to think of it as an evolution. I don’t want to get into difficult territory and I am far away from humanizing it, but let’s think about it as a “learning being” that evolves similar to how we do. When we start into the work life we are ready to conquer the world and believe that we know it all (didn’t we?!). But we did not and we all started as interns or apprentices or similar. And we did routine work, simple tasks that took time and effort but not necessarily added much value. If you would look at humans at work only in that stage, you were truly questioning the investment (salary, university, school, etc.) and the outcome. But we are all evolving from that first stage and the more we learn, the more we do and are exposed to, the better our output gets and the better the equation between inputs and outputs calculates.
Gen AI, your intern
I know that I have written in one of my last posts that (Gen) AI is in fact not the new kid on the block but among us for quite some time already. But if you think about the multitude of applications you see today, the ideas and developments, it is clearly visible that a big explosion of use-cases has just happened in the recent 2 years – you could say that all the time before, (Gen) AI was in school and university and only now it entered the work-life.
And so, you could argue that Gen AI is currently in its Intern state. It can help with certain work tasks and items, but in essence it is not a dramatic or revolutionary help (yet). If you compare Gen AI today, the use-cases you see or might be doing today and compare this to an average Intern’s output. How does it compare?
From Intern to Assistant to Business Partner
And if you then see how it evolved and improved over the last 2 years, see its potential – would you be surprised if in the next 2 years it would make the jump from Intern to Assistant? and maybe 2 years later (exponential improvement is very likely to be seen and therefore forecasted) it turns into a Business Partner for you. This is the story to develop, the story that we invest in today and why I believe we need to continue investing and developing Gen AI – there might be a hype, but eventually Gen AI will evolve to the next level of Assistant from today’s Intern and will pay back many of the investments from today – and once it is a Business Partner, investments will pay back with a huge dividend.
Gen AI is the long play
Gen AI is the long play. It has changed not too much just yet in your or my day-to-day business world but is helping out here and there – but it will do more over time. Only missing creativity and focus will limit its abilities. Start your journey today if you haven’t yet. Listen to my conversation with Wolfgang Hauner where he is clear that we will one day have the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), but also has proven that AI already today has an RoI for companies.
I wrote this post myself through and through, but my “Gen AI Intern” helped with some of the research 😉
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