AI Will Be the Next New Massive Platform

Don't underestimate the hype as AI reshapes the world!

My partner in crime

Adrian Sanabria

wrote a post recently that had me all worked up (ok not THAT worked up.. but I still disagree.) I watched the same All-In Podcast that triggered his thoughts on “AI as a platform,” and I had an opposite reaction than he did.

IMHO: AI will be globally transformative and act as the underlying platform for future technologies.

Here is the link to the episode at the exact point of the Doug Leone comments on AI being a platform. It’s short… give it a listen. *Side note, I introduced Adrian to the All-In Pod.. so yeah.. take that!

The Hype is Indeed Intense

The hype around AI reminds me of the web hype cycle in 1999 in silicon valley. I moved to the bay area in 1997 for a startup. I dropped out of undergrad in western New York and flew across the country with only a signing bonus in my pocket - no bed, no clothing, no nothing. I had to sleep on the floor in the closet of my tiny little studio apartment across the street from 1 Infinite Loop (Apple HQ). Until I could get settled in. I often stayed overnight at my employer's office with a blanket and pillow I borrowed from the engineering closet. Everyone was doing it! The world wide web had taken hold of the universe, and the hype was out of control. You couldn’t avoid the topic. Websites for every possible idea were being built left and right and funded into existence by insane amounts of venture capital flooding the valley's streets.

Where there is smoke, there is fire. Insane funding amounts don’t happen in a vacuum with a total result of failure. They happen when the herd mentality that is venture capital connects so violently with an investment thesis that anyone with a vague idea for a product can get funded. Today is no different with AI. You can get funded if you have anything to do with AI, whether focused on a single solution or a broader vision of what AI could mean to society. The bulk of the projects will miss. We will likely end up with an AI investing bubble resulting in a crash of AI projects when they realize specifically what it takes to be successful in this market. Like the .com era, from those ashes will arise a phoenix that ends up being the top-tier companies and products of the time, and going forward, they will dominate AI as it takes over the world - much like websites eventually did!

What Makes a Platform

We must first extrapolate a clear definition of the word to determine if AI is a platform. Of course, the most logical thing to do for this article is to ask ChatGPT how to define the term. So we did just that:

In general, a platform refers to a base or foundation upon which something else is built or supported.

In technology, a platform refers to a software or hardware environment that enables the development and deployment of applications or services. For example, the Android operating system is a platform for developing mobile applications.

In business, a platform can refer to a company or organization that provides a set of tools or services that enable other businesses or individuals to build their own products or services. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a platform that provides cloud computing infrastructure and services to other businesses.

So essentially, if someone can build a product on top of another tool, that tool becomes a platform. OpenAI introduced the concept of ChatGPT Plugins on March 23, 2023. According to ChatGPT and Bing AI search, 120 plugins are available as of May 20, 2023. As of February 2023 (yes, before the release of plugins), OpenAI’s API received an average of 3 million API calls per day, totaling over 1.5 billion examples per month. It is clear enough to say that people are building on top of OpenAI and that we should consider it a platform. To ensure I wasn’t crazy, I asked ChatGPT if OpenAI was a platform.

Yes, OpenAI can be considered a platform in the sense that it provides a variety of resources and tools for artificial intelligence (AI) research and development. These resources include AI models like GPT-3 and Codex, a cloud-based API for interacting with these models, and research papers and data sets that support the broader AI community. OpenAI's goal is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity, and it provides these resources as part of its mission to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, or to aid others in achieving this outcome.

That’s enough evidence to declare that most AI technology being used today (specifically OpenAI and ChatGPT) is indeed a platform. But how do we know if this is the platform that becomes transformative to the future of how we operate our lives daily? Is AI going to be the “Next New Massive Platform!”

When I start talking about the grand vision of AI disruption, people often throw other recent hype cycles in my face. The one I get most frequently is the debate that crypto would be the next massive transformative technology platform that changes how the world operates. This was just a bunch of hype with no real value behind it (at least, that’s my take on it). So what makes AI any different? Why will AI become the next .com wave that massively changes our lives?

Waves Dominate When Value Is Provided

Truth be told, I fell for a bit of the hype in the crypto run-up. I made a lot of money buying useless shit-coins and then lost it all when the bubble burst. I fell for people telling me that actual value was coming soon. While I didn’t fall for the “Bitcoin will rule the world” rhetoric, I did fall in love with the concept of smart contracts and using the blockchain to provide immutability of data and an accurate trail of operations that the world could see. I also believed in the idea of compute on the chain and having automated execution of code within those smart contracts. The key thing to learn from what happened to me was that I “BELIEVED IN IT,” … but I didn’t really “DERIVE VALUE FROM IT.”

In actuality, there was very little development on top of the blockchain that showed ACTUAL value to the end users of the products. Sure, there were crypto kitty games, drug and weapon purchases from dark web sites, and even some smart contract usage for certain niche needs. But we never really saw a world where blockchain and crypto came to provide real value to the daily lives of a random person with minimal technical capability. Crypto and blockchain became odd technology terms the masses didn’t understand or care about. Outside of gambling in shitcoins, the average person didn’t USE the blockchain or crypto.

AI is different. AI is a true platform with an exponential level of adoption. And we aren’t just seeing technology built for technology's sake because many smart people think it would be cool. We’re seeing LIVE applications of AI in the products we use every day and direct interaction with AI systems to ease the burdens of doing work daily. This is the exact definition of the masses finding value from a technology platform.

DARPA - Three Waves of AI

Finding Value from AI Today

To drive home the point of value being provided by AI today, I’ll attempt to enumerate where I touch AI (or AI touches me) every day.

• As I read news articles daily, I use a web clipper to automatically grab the article text, enter it into a database in Notion, use notion AI to summarize the article, and write three jokes. AI then creates a tweetstorm that I occasionally use to write tweets about things I read. The Cyber Why team then peruses this information weekly and writes our newsletter. While we rarely use the summary and joke text directly, the content definitely influences our decisions on the text that makes it into each piece. As the content improves, I'm sure we will start using it more directly!

• I’ve built a system that creates a text transcript of every meeting that I have, then using AI, summarizes the meeting, creates action items, emails me the action items list, adds it to a TODO list, and stores everything in a big daily notion database with a great calendar view. While I have homegrown this system myself, it won’t be long before you can pay someone like sembly.ai, fireflies.ai, otter.ai, or some other system to be your second brain. I plan to shelve my homegrown solution as soon as the products are baked enough to be fully usable.

• Working with clients as a fractional CMO, I often have to be creative. ChatGPT and OpenAI are my friends. I frequently use them to create that first big content lump of clay that I can form and mold into something you, as a reader, are interested in. I can do that right in the ChatGPT interface and prompt engineer my way to a successful piece, or I can take a first pass out of ChatGPT and mold the clay by hand. As I write, grammar.ly takes an AI approach to help me write in real-time. Additionally, I have Google AI built into Google Docs that I often use to help me create text.

• Finally, I am exploring an AI-backed contact management system and personal CRM. The system takes all my contacts, meetings, and emails and helps me determine who to stay in touch with and for what reasons. The system then guides me with automatic email options to sync and connect with people from my personal and business worlds. This is a fantastic new concept for people like me that are naturally introverted and horrible at staying in touch with people no matter how much I want to.

As you can see, I am a believer in the AI hype. The daily use cases are real, and the average human being will be significantly impacted by the progress of AI sooner rather than later. We are at the precipice of a massive change in how the technology we use everyday functions. AI is the underlying platform upon which we will build the next generation of transformative technologies!