Where is AI headed?

Here’s where AI is going and, most importantly, what to do about it.

The simple answer is the most obvious one: It’s going to get better. A lot better.

This image from Visual Capitalist does a great job articulating the trajectory:

The thing that struck me about the graph is, up until 2020, every category within which AI outpaced human performance was learning related: image, speech, and handwriting recognition; reading and language comprehension.

We were watching the machines learn how to learn.

After 2020, everything shown is about doing: common sense, math, code generation. There are also a ton of important functions that aren’t pictured. Things like graphic design, video editing, sentiment analysis, and copywriting. (No, this article isn’t AI generated.)

Even where AI hasn’t outpaced human performance from a quality perspective, it has obviously and massively outpaced human performance from a quantity and speed perspective.

The best illustration of this is an image generation tool like MidJourney or DALL-E.

You can prompt MidJourney for anything you’re creative enough to think up. The results range from worthless to okay, depending on the complexity of your prompt. You think this is where humans win the race? However, MidJourney creates the images in seconds.

In the time it would take a human to create one “good enough” design concept, MidJourney is capable of creating hundreds of thousands. Where ideation is the most important first step in most design processes, this puts MidJourney well ahead of human capabilities (in my opinion).

So what? The machines win, we lose, throw in the towel? No.

But it’s time for a massive reframe.

Instead of thinking about all of the things the machines do better than you, start thinking about all of the things you can do and build now that you have AI to assist you.

This advice came to me from Perry Belcher, who runs the AI Bot Summit and is the best in the world at actually using AI for real, tangible output. His advice to me was this: “Imagine you had an army of a million skilled workers who never slept and could do anything you asked…”

Talk about a reframe, right?

The people who win with AI are going to be the people who are capable of shifting their thinking to new orders of magnitude.

If you own a graphic design firm: Yes, AI replaces you and all of your employees. Without question. It’s only a matter of time.

But that same graphic design agency could become a full-blown film production studio using AI. The AI workforce could help with everything from screenwriting and storyboards, to animation, voiceovers, video production, scoring, editing, and even marketing and distribution.

Any time we want to figure out what someone is really passionate about, we always ask the same question: “If there were no limitations, what would you do?”

That question is no longer hypothetical.

There are no limitations, what are you going to create? What does the world need?

There’s something about the staggering truth of that understanding that is overwhelming and inspiring at the same time. It’s such an exciting time to be alive.

And, as these technologies come into their own and really start to yield fruit, it’s going to be amazing to see what’s created.

But, what’s created is still going to rely on someone like you thinking it up and asking for it.

So, I ask you: If there were no limitations, what would you do? What would you create? What does the world need?