I knew something was up when I starting hearing “AI” every 10 minutes. Not just on Bloomberg, but every email, every newsletter, every podcast was AI AI AI. It was earlier this year and Microsoft had recently announced their investment in ChatGPT.

Of course on queue anything AI related in markets went parabolic, look no further than the symbol “AI” itself for C3.ai and you see the sudden interest (volume spike circled) in late January. Worth noting also it appears to be breaking out once again. Oh well, have a nice trip.

I am not one to chase. Having lived through the Nasdaq tech bust in early 2000 I let the dust settle on new ideas and educate myself at my own pace. As Harry Callahan once said: “A man’s got to know his limitations”.

Speaking of limitations…

Everyone has forgotten about the Google engineer that was canned for claiming their AI chatbot LaMBDA had become sentient. In other words it “had feelings”.

This caused quite a stir for obvious reasons but the hype surrounding it settled down just as quickly.

Fast forward to today and a recent open letter suggests we need an AI holiday, a brief “pause” if you will to make sure it doesn’t get out of control before we inject some safeguards. If you haven’t read it I encourage you to do so. It is a concise but well developed and intentioned piece:

https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/

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ON BALANCE

My thoughts:

• Slow down. I agree 100% this is moving too quickly. While it may not be possible to put the Genie back in the bottle per se, it is well worth the time to add some guardrails. I would argue nobody can even define what those boundaries are just yet. Too much at stake to wild west this.
• Consistency. If any one company or country is deemed to have an advantage, all bets are off and it will be a race to see who capitalizes quickest.
• Make it a global effort. Use this as an opportunity to collaborate and engage on a global scale. We are accelerating in the exact opposite direction of polarization, this could be a topic that reverses that trend.
• Start small. Students are using this technology to write essays. The answer is not a full scale ban, instead work to define how it can be used effectively. Calculators made things easier, we didn’t ban them to the waste bin. The internet sped up and broadened research capability beyond measure. We aren’t going to be sending students back to library index cards anytime soon.

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I am sure there are more and this topic will be widely debated now that we appear to have crossed the Rubicon.

Human nature is to increase productivity and make lives for us “humans” easier. We also naturally seek to avoid and automate the mundane.

When something like AI comes along, the excitement and vision of endless possibilities fuel the same innovative spirit that brought us to this point.

Now that we are here, the attention must be directed to how we ALL harness those endless possibilities.

If that vision is not exactly clear due simply to speed then perhaps it is time to ease off the accelerator.

update

I think literally the day after I wrote this, the following image and article was in the WSJ. Once again, worth the read and food for thought.