By and Reid Hoffman
Is there any profession as quintessentially right-brained as an “artist?” Or one as left-brained as a “programmer?”
What’s been so remarkable to us about the rapid evolution that has characterized the last year, especially in the large language models, is how they’re now powering assistive tools that radically increase productivity, impact, and value across a wide range of professions.
For artists, we’ve got AI image-generation tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E, Midjourney, and many others. For programmers, we’ve got Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which helps software developers write, test, and refine code in many of the most currently popular computer languages.
While some AI skeptics characterize large language models as brute-force prediction machines that won’t ever imbue computers with anything like human intelligence or consciousness, what we see, in mind-blowing practice, is how profoundly these kinds of AI tools are already beginning to enhance human flourishing.
What Copilot does for developers and DALL-E does for visual creatives of all kinds is reduce or eliminate rote, time-consuming, but still crucial aspects of their jobs. Of course, this dynamic is hardly unique to software developers and artists. Large language models are trained on massive quantities of text data, then incorporate what they “learn” to generate statistically probable (contextually sensible) output to user-supplied prompts. So while Github Copilot was trained by ingesting massive quantities of computer code, different versions of Copilot are equally possible for virtually any profession.
A Copilot for attorneys, for example, could help them draft contracts, motions, briefs, and other legal documents based on natural language queries, previous cases, and best practices. It could also suggest relevant precedents, statutes, and citations, or flag potential errors, inconsistencies, or risks in existing documents.
A Copilot for architects could help them design, model, and optimize their buildings and structures based on their specifications, constraints, and objectives. It could also generate interactive visualizations and help scope out the environmental, social, and economic impacts of projects.
Imagine a world where millions of professionals across thousands of industries use domain-specific versions of Copilot to soar faster and higher to new levels of productivity, accuracy, and creativity. A world where professionals across all industries can use general-purpose tools like our portfolio company Adept’s Action Transformer to harness the power of every app, API, or software program ever written via interfaces that allow them to describe the tasks they want to accomplish in plain language.
In dystopian visions of the future, technology in general and AI in particular are often characterized as forces that will lead to an even more polarized world of haves and have-nots, with the bulk of humanity being disenfranchised, marginalized, and immiserated by machines.
In the world we actually see evolving today, new AI tools effectively democratize facility and efficiency in unprecedented ways. In doing so, they’re empowering individual professionals to achieve new productivity levels and society to achieve gains that may exceed those unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. Not only that, but people will also find their jobs more engaging and fulfilling because they’ll have more time to focus on the most creative, strategic, and novel aspects of them.
This future is here. There will be an AI amplifying tool for every major profession within five years. These tools can catalyze human excellence across occupations – right brain, left brain, and any brain.
Original article: https://www.generalist.com/briefing/what-to-watch-in-ai