As I work on more AI content generation installments, here are some quick thoughts spurred by OpenAI’s newly announced, open-source(!) speech-to-tex

Good news: AI is now in its midwit programmer phase

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2022-09-22 01:30:10

As I work on more AI content generation installments, here are some quick thoughts spurred by OpenAI’s newly announced, open-source(!) speech-to-text model, Whisper.

There was a golden age of web development in the early 00’s when rapid advances in tech and tooling made it incredibly easy for even the least talented tech worker to quickly churn out a clickable, singing, tap-dancing web page demo that could impress even technical upper-level managers who just weren’t quite current enough to grasp how easy it had just gotten to make something that looked really slick. (Some of my older readers did a bit of this back in the Cold Fusion days… real ones know.)

AI content generation is in this midwit programmer phase right now. It doesn’t take much in the way of tech mojo to stand up a basic web front-end for a machine-learning-backed service that performs absolute miracles. Or if you have an existing product, you and a team of 0.01X programmers can roll out a pretty spectacular new feature by just adding a few new API calls.

This dynamic is why this space is going to not only keep growing but is poised to support a meta-explosion of pick-and-shovel plays that help users with discovery and evaluation. (Hi, yes, it’s me. I will be doing some of that on this Substack.)