The long long tail of AI applications
Last year multiple companies asked me for advice. "We are evaluating this AI powered product, but do you think it makes sense at all? It seems a bit niche and we think ChatGPT might make this entire thing obsolete soon."
My answer so far has always been: "No, bare LLMs are not going to compete with this product." I think that people are failing to understand the distinction between different classes of AI companies. I see it like this:
There are orders of magnitude (!) more companies that will deal with Applied AI than Foundational AI, and they will be very busy for decades to come. Here's why:
In "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", a bunch of philosophers decide to ask a computer the answer to "The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything". After eons of calculations the computer famously answers "42" . The lesson is that we have to ask the right questions to get good answers. How does this relate to LLMs? Currently ChatGPT has an easy time looking intelligent because we are driving the conversation and we are responding pretty intelligently in the dialog with the LLM. A large part of the intelligent conversations with ChatGPT are due to the intelligence of the human.
When applying LLMs to a product, we have to be very clear about what answer we want answered, for all users of that product. This is difficult, and will require quite some brain power of the engineers at Applied AI companies.
