Did you think about what happened the last couple years?
Artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI, is transforming the world. This is likely going to be the most powerful technological breakthrough with regards to its impact upon humanity.
What is ironic is that it is free.
Think about that for a second. Big tech is spending tens of billions (soon to move into hundreds of billions) of dollars to give anyone on the Internet access to this technology.
And it costs them nothing.
Image generated by Ideogram
AI For Everyone
Naturally, this is not a statement of endearment for mega-tech. However, they are providing the world with a very valuable resource for nothing.
Through their models, the cost of knowledge is dropping through the floor. If progress occurs as I forecast, the next generation models will simply put us at a place where we are looking at graduate school level intelligence in most areas.
Again, this will have no price tag.
Before going any further, I must state that the first generation of the next models could well carry a charge. There are pricing levels with most of these services. That said, there are basic features that are available to anyone. Typically, a new model means the last generation is passed along as free.
Then we have to consider the open source arena. When it comes to LLMs, this is basically Meta. With images, we get a few other options starting to emerge.
The point here is, over the next 12-18 months, humanity will receive ever growing amounts of knowledge generation tools, for nothing.
For those who are willing to be a generation or two behind, the progress will still be amazing.
Technological Deflation
This is technological deflation in action. It is something that gets overlooked by most, for a couple reason.
To start, unless one is looking for it, things can be hard to see. In the past, it was slow moving. For those old enough, we can look back and see how things changed.
For example, consider reproducing a document. There was a time when someone sat at a typewrite with carbon paper and re-typed the entire document. This gave a total of 3 copies.
Today, consider how something posted online can end up viewed by millions. Elon Musk writes a long for tweet, it opened and viewed by an unbelievable amount of individuals.
Compare that to the typing pool. What is the cost differential? Under the old, it likely cost 5 minutes of time, perhaps 50 cents between time and supplies. To send out was another few cents.
What would the price tag have been on a million? Obviously, this would have gone to press.
With generative AI, we can have a document generated in a few seconds and paste it somewhere so others can see.
The second reason why most overlook this phenomenon is zero does not compute into statistics.
When calculating the official stats, situation like above are not mentioned. The ability to create and distribute documents for free is not included. There was a time when this was big business. No longer.
We see it with image generation. Knowledge is dropping to near zero. Soon to follow is video generation, where cinema quality videos will be made simply using a few prompts.
We can expect this to continue.