There isn’t one AI market right now. There are two. One is real. One is fake.
What people care about is the fake market. Alexa running your life. Dave refusing to open the pod bay door. White collar workers made homeless. Being unable to distinguish what’s real from what’s not.
The Cloud Czars are working on this stuff, but they’re nowhere near delivering it. Meanwhile, they’re warning the world about how scary the future is. They want to be regulated so the resulting “regulatory capture” will guarantee their futures. They want a high barrier to entry start-ups can’t climb over. They certainly don’t want open source.
When will this fake market become real?
It will become real when cars really drive themselves.
Self-driving cars can already deal with the rational problems of driving. They can’t deal with the irrational problems.
Idiots who cut across several lanes to the exit. The 50 mph relative speed difference you find on urban freeways. Speed demons cutting in and out. Intown, kids who jump into the road, or let their dogs or toys do it. Bicycles, scooters, and protestors who deliberately create obstacles. People who routinely ignore traffic laws.
These are what drivers like me see every day, but computers must deal with it flawlessly. We won’t accept behavior from an AI that we’ll easily rationalize from a neighbor.
It’s when software can deal with irrationality that consumer AI becomes real.
Not before.
The Real AI Market
The real AI market lies in “AI Assistants.” These are systems with vetted inputs, and defined outputs, that make workers and companies more productive. Helping hospitals schedule patients. Helping non-artists do presentations that won’t put you to sleep. Making people who think better than they write understood. Delivering real-time insights to top management. Taking customers down a long, complex sales funnel.
Along the way, we can finally get to the Machine Internet. We can make factories, hospitals, and utilities more efficient. We can control both service workers and their equipment, even manage our police and traffic systems in a granular way.
This is where the best work in AI is being done. It’s where productivity is happening. It’s where value is being created.
But it’s a business-to-business market. I worked for b2b publishers early in my career. It’s not what people care about. But it’s where the money is in AI today.
That’s why there has been a pause in the run-up of AI stocks. Investors see the failures of consumer AI to launch, and don’t see the successes in business AI. They will be shocked when they see the investment, the revenues, and the profits from putting the cloud to work thinking about things that matter.
