How Generative A.I. is the New Hype Train of Artificial Intelligence

How Generative A.I. is the New Hype Train of Artificial Intelligence

Hello Futurists,

A longer read: 2,778 words.

This is the fist installment of my latest Newsletter (my 17th) called Future Watch. I'm hoping it will simulate some readers to think of the future differently. You can sign up here.

Silicon Valley is fueled on promises, hype and venture capital plugged public relations marketing. As I witness the explosion of interest around generative-AI, I am stunned how so many future trends end up failing even after $Billions of dollars of investment. There's a certain poetry to the madness, Venture Capitals gambling on emerging tech must be seductive.

As China builds more utilitarian tech urging the evolution of Surveillance Capitalism to new levels, I cannot say the same of the West. As many are pointing out a few months after the rise of Stability.AI and startups around GPT-3, investors have got the hots for "generative AI" that can make text and images. But so far, the hype runs ahead of the business results.

The Western internet is based on Advertising and as such hype is a familiar if grueling and untruthful side-effect. Indeed platforms like LinkedIn champion "positive" content which invariably just means public relations and trying to look good. Generative-AI already looks good, some of those images are stunning.

But how useful will Generative-AI be? After the Metaverse Hype it was NFTs, and now we have a new trend to holler about. Don't get me wrong, I'm bullish on Stability. AI's future, but how many startups are going to be winners in this space? According to Wired, Sarah Guo (pictured above), founder of venture capital firm Conviction, organized a buzzy salon at a posh bar in San Francisco last week. The new AI-fund is of course bullish on Generative-AI.

The trend is certain to warp the internet as we (know) knew it. For every reset there is a rehash. From Elon Musk killing Twitter to Meta's fall from grace, it's clear Silicon Valley didn't really innovate during its time at the top. As humans find new ways to create with the help of A.I, it's a wild-wild west of attribution, legality and arguments whether this is even genuine creativity.

The idea is with human prompts, text-to-image, text-to-video, text-to-music and other things are now possible and there are hundreds of startups trying to break the field wild open. Companies like Hugging Face, OpenAI, Stability.AI and others have taken on increasing importance in just a matter of months.

OpenAI's GPT-3 hasn't just benefitted Microsoft it's spawned a machine-age of the internet. And this is rather important to point out, the TikTok Creations are getting less human. Gone are the days of parading our images to our friends, the internet has moved on. But to what exactly?

Is automated content going to be good for these layers of reality, products and games we are building in the internet? Generative AI enthusiasts predict the technology will take root in all kinds of industries and will do much more than just spit out images or sentences. Does it empower artists or disrupt them? How about copywriters, advertisers, freelance brand consultants or writers?

There is a nebulous sense of the power of generative-AI, and a new speed of content production. The text-to-image trend has become so spammy, several Reddits have banned the content as imposter spam that detracts from the value of the human community. I get that. Silicon Valley futurists have long speculated—some with fear, others with giddiness, says the MSM —about what the world will look like when artificial intelligence infiltrates the mainstream. For years, their deepest hopes and fears failed to materialize. But in recent weeks, the tech industry declared in concert that the future had arrived.

Suddenly in 2023 there will be more evidence or robots and internet tools that automate a lot of what we were doing manually before. Whether we like it or not, A.I. will warp our realities, our cities and our experiences online. There is no such thing as regulation to moderate this process, no Government body of AI regulation, not even a BigTech council of A.I. safety, nothing.

Instead, there are the Venture Capitalists, greedy technologists, engineers and media that sings the songs Silicon Valley ways are true. But with the Metaverse, self-driving cars, chatbots, the internet of things and incredible AGI in the rear view mirror the plots and the reality of the West seem broken. There is a fundamental disconnect with reality and a craving to create new realities for cold profit.

There is at least a stimulus for innovation however. David Song, a senior at Stanford University who is tracking the boom, has collated a list of over 100 generative AI startups. They’re working on applications including generating music, game development, writing assistants, customer service bots, coding aids, video editing tech and other gimmicks we may not have yet heard of.

The Scope of Generative-AI will Impact Many Industries

• Music

• Writing assistants

• Game development

• Customer service bots

• Coding aids

• Video editing tech

• Other gimmicks

The U.S. knows it's facing a productivity dilemma as economists are warning of a slowdown in U.S. productivity that threatens its GDP growth rates in the coming decades. Technologists are scrambling to find an answer, and some believe that the Generative AI trend may be a potential solution, along with robotics, improved automation and the no-code era.

It's pretty doubtful Generative-AI will help solve the productivity apocalypse for an aging America and other nations like China, but if manufacturing robots are any indication in China, Korea, Singapore and other leading countries, we are going to try. A.I. is going to be used to automate as much of society as possible.

VR worlds and self-driving cars sounded nice in theory, and so does a massive wave of Generative-AI startups. The list of 100 startups is in reality likely easily 500+ startups born in just 2022, but it does give you an idea of how the Generative-AI will need funding and Venture Capital will be more happy to call this the next meta trend.

When Jasper.AI and Stability.AI are both capable of raising $100 million, you know it's somewhat serious for the 2020s. Do we want to write things mostly with A.I. or watch YouTube's that will quickly become generative by A.I. soon? Do we want to read content generated by machine intelligence? As pretty as some of the new images are, do we want to listen to music that's fabricated mostly synthetically? Just a new tool they say.

Most articles true to the internet of hype, attempt to say how Generative AI is a steady improvement in the future of artificial intelligence. They say, Generative AI technology—broadly defined as artificial intelligence that doesn’t just process preexisting data sets, but creates wholly original text, images, audio, videos and code—has never looked better, sounded crisper or been easier for the general population to access.

They go on to state that Generative-AI is leading to a democratization of accessibility to new tools that will augment our human creativity. They fail to mention how the trend could corrupt the internet, make people less creative and harm society in various ways. No, that's too negative for the internet of positive sentiment, where we are all shiny happy people with A.I.

Even I as a futurist, who tries to make a living on A.I. evangelism and news coverage, but also (and even I) must adhere to some basic morality of journalistic standards where my purpose is not to just hype this up. I don't profit from these startups getting funding, being acquired or creating a more fake internet. In fact, I admit that it could lead to a kind of dystopian where China is using A.I. to build real products and Silicon Valley keeps getting lost in its dreams of profit.

Sarah Guo believes generative AI is a leap in the potential of AI technology similar to one beginning in 2012 that reshaped the whole tech industry and the products it offers. Of course the Venture Capitalists must go with the hype, since that is how they make money as we have seen with the crypto, NFT, ICO and token darlings. A.I. is the catalyst of hype, but where are its benefits?

The robots are still learning to walk, Self-driving experiments are being shut down or going IPO at a discount, and deep learning hasn't done much for society lately. This even as DeepMind and OpenAI swear that are doing incredible AI for good work, for their Google and Microsoft overlords no doubt.

The Generative-AI hype is already getting out of hand. Recently the founder of Stability.AI made some outlandish comments. According to the Information, after raising $100 million of venture capital in three successive equity funding deals in the last two months, most recently at up to a $1 billion valuation, Emad Mostaque recently told investors he wanted to raise an additional $1 billion of capital at a multibillion-dollar valuation, according to two people with knowledge of the founder’s comments.

The Terrifying Birth of Generative A.I.

If 2022 was the year of Generative-AI, what happens when GPT-4 is released likely in 2023? Getting bots to do stuff with human prompts sounds fun, until we can just build AI to do the prompting and then what? We live on an internet on autopilot? We reduce the number of employees needed to do sales, marketing, administration and coding? We replace artists with artistic directors? We ask A.I. to build video games for us?

It could be that for BigTech, no-code, Coding assistants and RPA have a new cousin of Generative-AI where they will need to go on M&A buying sprees just to keep up with the Hugging Faces of the world. Microsoft and OpenAI must be terrified by how much competition they already have in such a short time.

Generative AI for Copywriting

• Copy AI

• Copysmith

• Jasper AI

• Contenda

• Writesonic

• Anyword

• Hypotenuse AI

• Writer

• Regie.ai

• PepperType AI

• Bertha

• Clickable

Exhibit B: Generative AI for Coding

• GitHub Copilot

• Tabnine

• Codiga

• Mutable AI

• Replit Ghostwriter

• Mintlify

• Stenography

• Debuild

• Enzyme

• Durable

• Moderne

The race is now on to find the applications of generative AI that will make a mark on the world - Wired

The text-to-video race may be the most important. This is something I'd expect TikTok's owner ByteDance may be working on even as Facebook is working on a hypothetical Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), and not just Virtual Reality platforms.

Exhibit C: Generative AI for Chatbots

• Character AI

• Chai.ml

• Gemsouls

• Circle Labs

• Replika

• Alethea AI

• maya

• Daemon

• Quickchat

I guess this is what Silicon Valley calls innovation, hyping something until it proves to be a failure. Well then here we go again! The UK watchdog had to warn against "emotion-reading" AI tech that can be very harmful to the HR and sales industry. But how do regulate A.I. that begins to build A.I. that automates content, internet features and the way information multiplies? With such a lack of regulatory scrutiny and due diligence, the Western internet may completely fail due to the experiment. In fact, there are signs it already is with TikTok swallowing legacy social media.

Exhibit D: Generative A.I. for Sales

• Lavender

• Smartwriter.ai

• oliv.ai

• Twain

• Outplay

• Creatext

As writing assistants like Grammarly improve they will also be able to do more things. They will be able to afford to scoop some of the best of these up and companies like Zoom as well who are leaving A.I. for sales. Hard to believe Grammarly have $400 million in funding.

What will GitHub Copilot become as well? TechCrunch pointed out recently that according to Microsoft, GitHub now has an annual recurring revenue of $1 billion, up from a reported $200 to $300 million at the time of the acquisition.

I can already imagine some consolidation between Generative AI startups as easy pickings for bigger companies and sweet exits for these founders. There's a lot of synergy especially on the enterprise AI and sales and marketing automation side of things.

OpenAI, the powerhouse AI research company behind Dall-E 2, is in talks for a nearly $20 billion valuation, and just led a funding round for Descript, an audio- and video-editing AI startup, according to reporting by The Information. How do you value OpenAI at $20 billion in a world where Stability.AI stole its thunder in text-to-image generation so quickly? It's hard to even fathom.

And now it seems wherever Google and Microsoft try to go with the tech, they will be met by more motivated startups who can scale and make the tech more accessible and easier than they can. All due respect to DeepMind and OpenAI but that commercial playbook doesn't exactly have a lot of industry wins thus far or much applied pilots of A.I. actually generating anything useful for society directly.

Generative-AI may indeed be laying the groundwork for a more AI-centric future. If you can call it that, a world where many repetitive human tasks do have an expiration date. A world where software will get a no-code feel and A.I. will be packaged and re-packaged endlessly. A world where 40% of startups that claim to have an A.I. component, don't in reality. This is the world Silicon Valley built and a world made to profit Venture Capitalists, not people. That indeed is part of the problem.

Between generative AI for copywriting, writing and sales - it's all a bit the same. Give it a few years, who knows where it will be. There's a lot of gimmicks out there.

Exhibit D: Generative AI for Tooling

• Humanloop

• Everyprompt

• Dust

• Yurts.ai

• Chroma

• Generally Intelligent

• Common Sense Machines

• Replicate

• Banana

• Mosaicml

• co:here

I thought crypto and Web 3 FOMO was bad, but this is A.I. FOMO at its finest or more spammy, I'm not sure which. All the hundreds of articles on Generative A.I. in 2022 barely say anything much of what this tech will do to our future or how it will explode content on the internet. It might even make the internet go extinct as we knew it.

When in the real world industrial robots are taking over, Silicon Valley creates mirages of hype like Web 3, the Metaverse or Generative AI as if to distract us from what's really going on, a tidal wave of robots and geopolitical conflict with China that could end really badly. No, barely any mention of that in the context of technology.

It's almost if Venture Capital based in Silicon Valley is like a misinformation matrix that even academics buy into, creating hype that weirdly feeds into the salaries of expensive engineers. Many of whom will work on projects that go absolutely nowhere, startups that fail in crowded early spaces with mission statements that won't come to fruition. But as long as Venture Capital milks the trend, who cares right? This is American Monopoly capitalism on the steroids that is Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists, let the startups do the hard work while BigTech and larger enterprise companies wait to acquire them. Rinse and repeat in a new manufactured trend.

Ten years later, Web 3, self-driving cars and a host of other things like chatbots, IoT and 3D-printing, genomics, blockchain and many A.I. products barely changed our day to day or future of work reality. I wonder if they will given another ten years? But who regulates A.I. or censors the Venture Capitalists in a winner-takes-all Capitalism that is supposed to be free? We might have to get A.I. to do it too.

The Positive Internet = Hype = Public Relations (when all the people have checked out of their social media accounts).

An internet that's less and less real is not leading humanity to the promised land and Generative AI has as much chance of corrupting it further than elevating our creativity and being useful. But there are no guard rails in A.I. especially so far as Venture Capital is concerned who main objective is to make money $.

The internet governed by principles of Venture Capital and BigTech, isn't okay.