Rise of the Machines

Yes, this is a post about AI, but not just about AI. This is a post about how much things have changed in the world. For brands. For consumers. For anyone who buys and/or sells anything. Which is all of us.

COVID-19 changed everything, sure. We all know that by now. There are some people and businesses who are still using that as an excuse to underdeliver or deliver late. "Oh, you know, COVID" has been the apathetic battle cry for anyone not getting it done for years. It's the El Niño of a new generation.

COVID forced people to get more things done online. Online shopping had been increasing gradually through Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 for years. Amazon changed the world long ago (2005) when it launched free 2-day shipping. But COVID sped that along. It forced late adopters to go online for more and more of their wants and needs. Not just random Amazon purchases anymore. Whole industries like grocery shopping and restaurant dining moved online virtually overnight.

A lot of businesses went under. But a lot of people got rich too. Businesses who were ready for the world to move completely online were having the fattest year of their life. Our business had about an 18-month boom just because we are fairly "digitally native" for our category. 

Now the world is changing again.

Let's be really clear that AI has been around for a long time. You can read a little more about the history of AI in this article from Harvard. It's from 2017 so it doesn't even include any of the stuff that's happening right this second. The first time I really became aware of AI was when Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, reigning world champion and grand master, at chess in 1997. 

Deep Blue was far from a sentient being but it was fascinating to see a computer do a "human brain thing" better than one of the most skilled humans at that particular thing. It reasoned and iterated and ultimately won. And that was 26 years ago.

Then there was Big Data and Machine Learning and Deep Learning. There was the rise of the algorithm, popularized by tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. It's become part of the lexicon to see some weird ad or video pop up in your feed and say "oh that crazy algorithm." We've been seeing AI all around us in our daily lives for years and years. 

Oh, and self-driving cars. People have been tinkering at those in some form for something like 85 years. Not new stuff, but certainly becoming more prevalent as the technology gets more powerful and ubiquitous. 

So now let's talk all the "new stuff". If you think about AI and immediately think ChatGPT, you are definitely not alone. The new wave of AI is grabbing a lot of attention because (a) it's fucking amazing and (b) it's generative. That means it makes stuff. It can output sound, copy, images, and video. Stuff that, uh, humans used to do. It's incredibly wild. 

In the last 2 months, I've used ChatGPT (GPT 4) to review contracts, draft emails, write programs in Python, troubleshoot NetSuite issues, respond to customer service messages, build meal plans, and start several (mock) businesses. I'm grabbing all the AI plugins I can and trying them out while this new wave builds. I've installed Python and Git so I can run AutoGPT and BabyAGI. 

While AutoGPT is not fully "ready for prime time," I've used it for some pretty simple research builds and it can do really extensive market research and information gathering all on its own. The kind of internet research work that would take a human a couple of weeks, AutoGPT did in about 18 minutes for a cost of less than $1.  

And let's be very clear, this new tech wave will destroy massive amounts of jobs. Ignore the platitudes that suggest otherwise. Here's a good MIT article from 2013 about tech destroying jobs. I'll give you the quick takeaway: technology has been destroying jobs since technology and jobs have existed together. It's definitely made human jobs safer, but it IS DESTROYING JOBS. Just briefly take my example above of having an experimental, open-source, basically-free, available-to-everyone tool to do 2 weeks of human work in minutes. For $1. 

Manual labor industries are used to being overthrown by tech. The printing press made the entire typesetting industry obsolete overnight, and other such common examples. I think the thing that is hardest to grasp about what is happening right this moment is that AI is poised to take over large sectors that have historically been done by creatives and knowledge workers. Mid-level marketers, designers, copywriters, analysts, and assistants will have a harder time finding jobs than ever. Especially if they don't know how to use the new technology.

Let me tell you the hack: Learn how to use the tech and learn fast.

The most valuable workers in any field will be the ones who can 10x or 100x their output by utilizing AI. Businesses still need marketers, but they need marketers who can function as a team of 20 with just one person. 

The ramifications for startups are massive, my friends. The ability to scale a new business is getting exponentially faster and cheaper literally overnight. Everyone has to rethink their strategy. VC's can't go in with the same check sizes they did even 3 years ago. If you're a VC on your first fund and you've got, say, $100mm to deploy, think about investing in 50 companies instead of 8 or 10! Oh, and think about building an AI platform first. The VC that can put $2mm into a startup and say "oh we can also get you on this platform that will 10x your whole team overnight" will win massively. Invest in that first.

This is truer for tech because CPG has more incremental costs, but you are going to be able to upscale any team faster and cheaper. What if you had a CFO-in-a-box? You could feed in your assumptions in plain English and get an operating plan. What if you could have one person run an AI marketing team with national reach? What if all your admin and HR tasks were done perfectly, for free, in the background?

It's scary as hell.

It's exciting as fuck. 

(Featured art was generated by Midjourney, using a prompt from ChatGPT, with the input as the body text of this blog post. Yeah it's a little creepy.)