Tim O’Reilly on the Real Implications of Generative AI

This is a short talk by Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media that caters to software coders, the curator of the FOO Camp unconferences, & the person who coined Web 2.0.

O"Reilly was one of about a dozen remarkable innovators who spoke at the event, which was created and produced by Reinvent Futures, and held at the new Shack15 club in the Ferry Building of San Francisco in May of 2023.

You can find out more about The Great Progression series through the written essays in Substack here: https://peterleyden.substack.com

You can find out more about what we learned at this specific event on the Real Implications of Generative AI here: https://peterleyden.substack.com/p/th...

You can read extended quotes from Tim and the other speakers at this event here: https://peterleyden.substack.com/p/th...

You can find out more about the strategic foresight company Reinvent Futures that created and produced the events here: https://www.reinvent.net

Some key extended quotes from this short talk:

I want to give you a perspective on the history of computing that we don't usually talk about. Each great advance in computing has brought computers closer to human speech.

The very first computers were literally hardwired circuits. Then we got to basic and machine language. Then we started to write assembly language, which was very close to the language of the machine. Only a small number of people could do it.

Then you have a breakthrough with the personal computer and it wasn't just that personal computers became commonplace, it's that they also started to have much easier programming language such that hobbyists and individuals could start to imagine, "Hey, I can use this thing." So it was a democratization. It was coming closer to human speech.

Then we see a revolution like the graphical user interface, which again made it possible for even more people to use computers, because you didn't have to learn any arcane language, you could just start pointing and clicking.

Then suddenly you get this breakthrough with the worldwide web and it's inverted the paradigm. Instead, you have human language that is the interface, written language to be sure, and that calls up individual programs.

And guess what? This Generative AI is the next big wave. For the first time, we really are starting to have computers that have gotten smart enough that they're coming all the way towards us where we can actually speak with them in our language and they can understand it. So that's a profound shift.

I think we're just at the beginning of an astonishing new wave that really is bigger than any of the previous waves, just as each one that came along was bigger than what came before. There were hundreds of millions of PCs and everybody thought that was amazing. Then suddenly there were billions of people on the internet.

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In a way, the story of computing is also the story of the development of a kind of hybrid. Many times when we think of AI we think of it as some kind of singular intelligence apart from us. I like to suggest that AI is kind of a massive hybrid of human and machine.

This is another way of thinking about this progress. You used to have these individual machines, they became more and more connected, but more than that, they became connected not just as machines, but as devices for harnessing and harvesting the collective intelligence of all their users.

If you think about what I called Web 2.0 back in 2004, it was really about how what came after the DotCom bust were the companies that harnessed collective intelligence. Google literally took all the knowledge that was embodied in all the documents that humans were creating and then presented it in this new way. Twitter made it real time.

Now, this GenAI is the next stage because these are large language models. They are taking all of human written text and bringing it together. So they're really an amalgam of human and machine. They're reflecting ourselves back to us.

Of course, that's an important thing you realize. They're a mirror. They're a mirror of all that's good and bad in our society, and it's really important when we think about, "Oh, we're going to fix the bias." We don't want to be fixing the mirror. We want to be fixing what it is showing us, which is us.

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We're in this moment of an intense explosion into the next stage, which is going to be enormously larger than anything that's happened before. It is going to bring people and machines together in new ways, and we're really only at the beginning. It will be very disruptive, but I think it's also incredibly empowering and it will help us.

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I like to end with a quote from Hal Varian, Google's chief economist who once said about robots, "If we're lucky, the robots will arrive just in time."