What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

Benedict Evans is one of the most thoughtful writers on technology. Whenever I listen to him, I end up feeling embarrassed, because I keep thinking: why can’t I think like that? 😬

Unlike many other commentators, Ben has a very practical and measured view of AI. One thing I love is how he goes about defining what AI actually is in the first place:

So, I was asked to come and explain AI again at SuperAI. I always think a good place to start if we want to understand this is to ask, “Well, what is it that we mean when we say AI?”

This is a really important observation from 1970 from Larry Tesler, who was an AI scientist. He said, “AI is whatever machines can’t do yet, because once it works, we say, ‘Well, that’s not AI anymore. That’s just software.’” AI is the stuff that doesn’t work yet, or maybe that’s only just started working.
If we think about the history of this:
In the 1970s, databases had superhuman memory, and people made movies about how databases were going to take over the world. Today, databases are software, or indeed, legacy software.

Ten years ago, machine learning was AI. Today, I think machine learning is just software. I would guess probably half the people in this room would say it’s still AI, and the other half would say, “Nah, now it’s just software.” You use your phone, you take a picture of your child or your dog, and you can search for it. Fifteen years ago, that would have been witchcraft. Ten years ago, it was AI. Now it’s just software.

Today, we have large language models and generative AI, whatever we want to call it. And maybe this is AI, or if you’re Sam Altman trying to get out of your Microsoft contract, you will say it’s superintelligence. But for everybody else, is this AI, or in 10 years’ time, is there still just going to be more software?

Is This a New Platform Shift?
I think we don’t know yet. Bill Gates, two or three years ago, said this was the biggest thing he’d seen in his lifetime since the graphical user interface. So Bill is suggesting, “No, this isn’t just more software; this is something else.” Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said something similar, that we’re on the track to AGI, that “no, this isn’t more software; this is something else.”

So, if we think about the progression of technology over the last 50 or 60 years, we’ve tended to move in cycles. We have a platform shift every 10 or 15 years:
We had mainframes.
Then we had PCs.
Then the web.
Then smartphones.

You could put other things on here, like databases, client-server, or open source. Each of these pulled in all of the investment, innovation, and company creation. The old thing is still there. Airlines still run on mainframes, and banks still run on mainframes, but the new thing is where all the innovation, all the investment, all the change, and all the company creation happens.

And so the view is that now this is the next platform shift. Generative AI is the next thing after smartphones, after the web, after PCs. But there’s also a view that says, “no, this is something fundamentally different. This is breaking the cycle. It’s a much bigger change than that. It’s something more like electricity, or computing, or fire, or like the next generation of humanity,” or something else.
Out of that, I think you get a range of possible outcomes.

It might be that this is just more software, that there will be thousands of models, just as there are thousands of databases or millions of spreadsheets. And then at the other extreme, it might be that we’ll have one giant world computer that runs everything. You can go to it and say, “How do I move to Singapore?” or “How do I buy a house in Hong Kong?” or “How do I do my taxes in five different jurisdictions?” and it’ll just do it for you. The thing is, we don’t really know what’s going to happen. We have a range of possibilities and opinions.

https://youtu.be/niJpDnNtNp4?si=9Y4kKOIbYJTebdrD

https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations