Jeeeez! Not another AI newsletter!
Adventures in multi-modal AI to inspire those who don't write software for a living.
Despite all the promises of AI, more tokens are spent on generating inane content than on trying to cure cancer. AI is literally everywhere.
At least: on the internet...
As a CTO and overall technology enthusiast, I try to stay somewhat on top of the wild set of innovations that roll out daily. That means spending a lot of time online, reading about and experimenting with new tools.
Yet, when talking to customers, I see a huge gap between what's shared on socials and what happens in the workplace.
Most companies are still figuring out how to apply text-based LLMs. Large companies are still discussing whether to roll out Microsoft CoPilot. European enterprises still struggle with the legal implications of sending data to Sam Altman's server farm. The average professional, if they use ChatGPT at all, uses it on the sly! New science fiction technology is released daily, yet the real-life applications are… boring.
Business leaders and professionals feel like they should do something with AI, but don't see how it can solve their really valuable problems. We don’t seem to get much further than another chatbot. Sure, let's add another AI assistant that generates terrible emails.
There’s an enormous gap between the bleeding edge techies write about and the actual business innovations.
Why is that?
Silicon Valley lore is full of tech visionaries disrupting industries they knew nothing about. Jeff Bezos famously never sold a book before launching Amazon. Yet that's the exception. Most of the innovation isn't purely tech-driven. Software innovation needs non-software drivers. Most innovation requires deep domain knowledge. A doctor and an ML engineer need each other to build that model for early melanoma detection. You can't just AirBnB that together without deep domain knowledge.
So, if the average professional is years behind the AI state of the art, the opportunity is enormous. There are thousands of great AI products hidden in the brains of those who don't build software for a living!
Google predicts that 2025 will be the year of multimodal LLMs. Video, voice, audio, and images are quickly taking over from purely text-based ChatGPT. To capitalize on that, we need to get non-software professionals an insight into the current state of multimodal AI. To inspire and trigger insights for real-life, valuable business applications.
So, the goal of this newsletter is to have a great excuse for me to experiment with AI tools and to come up with some high-level ways to apply this to your business. It's an invitation for you to come up with better ways they can be applied in your field of expertise.
So yes, another AI newsletter.
But this time, a pragmatic one to inspire the team leads, product managers and business people out there.