Why You Need To Look Beyond Not Just The AI Hype

The Longer View Of All Things AI

Any new technology goes through a path.

There's a huge amount of excitement, and then there's the valley of despair—Gartner famously maps this as the ‘Hype Cycle,’ with a Peak of Inflated Expectations that’s so often immediately followed by a Trough of Disillusionment.

Well, surely we’re at the Peak of Inflated Expectations right now with all things ChatGPT… at the top of a huge amount of excitement about what it's going to do.

But it has always been the case that all this is followed by some disillusion for even the most useful tech until we become a bit more rational about its real contribution.

I think we are just starting to see that with AI.

Recently, ChatGPT made available its first few plugin technologies, and a lot of people hailed that as akin to Apple creating the App Store—it was going to be the next big thing.

Shall we just politely say, most developers don’t see it quite like that right now.

Few are really active, you pretty much have to know which plugin you're going to want to use beforehand, and first reports suggest it's all a bit convoluted.

And many of this admittedly first wave of OpenAI plugins are just ridiculously uninteresting; one, the browsing plugin that was supposed to bring ChatGPT totally up to date with everything on the Internet that happened after it was first trained in September 2021, has actually received quite a lot of negative reaction on Developer Twitter.

In fact, it was so disappointing it was recently replaced with a Bing search plugin.

At least some tech experts are pulling back a bit now and saying, Hmm, maybe this first set of Generative AI’s may not be as great and useful as we all thought it was going to be.

What Tech History 101 Can Teach You

The reality is that because of that hype that "AI is going to take everyone's job and replace every developer", that of course there has to be some correction.

We have to step back and be a bit more rational, and I think one of the first things we’ll decide is that ChatGPT-like tools are not going to replace all developers.

I suspect we’re also soon going to be seeing a lot of op-eds that will shake off the gloom and doom and say maybe knowledge workers and skilled professionals will continue to have a job, too.

At the same time, history teaches us that we have to temper even that reaction: the reality will be somewhere in the middle between an AI jobs winter and a UBI-funded utopia.

For me, a way to get there is also to try and see some wood for trees.

Let me explain why.

We've had a defining moment in terms of the release of ChatGPT.

But all that really is, is an end-user interface to you having a dialog with an AI.

We are missing the importance of what’s going on at the AI side of that, the platform and the developer environment that will leverage the APIs and the services underneath ChatGPT to create new solutions.

ChatGPT itself is not going to replace Salesforce, because it's just a chat window—there's no way just one solution is going to replace a huge brand.

Instead, the real revolution is developers leveraging what will become more and more common standard AI the APIs leveraging—there’s a new framework called Langchain, which is shaping up as a great framework to connect large language models, and give AI a kind of ‘train of thought', for example.

That could really advance AI, as could developments like autoML.

This has all been going on quietly before ChatGPT hit the headlines, and will continue even in the coming slough as developers continue to work to make AI into a dependable, scalable platform to build new, disruptive solutions.

That aspect is critical, because this is where developers will always have a role, as this is where innovation is going to come from—leveraging AI as a kind of a new cloud that will reinvent how we do business in the 2030s.

From that perspective, ChatGPT is a nice thing, but it's going to be seen as very, very limited extremely fast, which I suspect we are just beginning to see (‘Oh, this is a new prompt for GPT. Meh’).

No, ChatGPT's not The Revolution—which is actually going to come from all those developers coming up with brand new AI-native solutions that make the most of all the APIs that are being built out there.

And which you could be building, too?