[WIP] AI is worth the water, but it's not the product
It feels like right now, on one side there doom and gloom about the AI space overall. One of the often repeated claims is that 20-50 GPT queries use the equivalent of 500ml of water.
For now we'll ignore the problems in the study, such as the fact that this water use isn't contextualized in comparison other industries, the fact that the paper is based on a study that is awaiting peer review and the dubious link that is implied between data center water use and global water scarcity. As well as the fact that, purely in the tech scene it's by far not the worst offender.
On the other side of the argument there are the evangelists that believe AI will bring us to a promised age, nothing will be the same, some "Brave New World" type vision of a life of leisure brought on by the all powerful AGI.
Honestly, I think neither are true. Or aleast that some elements are true of both. We have to admit that in some cases, AI has allowed us to do things reliably we never thought possible. Some of the recent advances you could argue have brought us into a new AI golden age. But, it is an expensive, and heavy tool.
I think we're kind of in AI's wierd awkward teenage phase right now. We've moved past the baby photos where companies would tack "AI" onto anything and everything in order to boost valuations and look more modern and now we're in a different phase
Rory Sutherland has a great expression to capture this, in terms of a Cambrian Explosion. A new kind of era has begun where we've discovered the electric motor where only internal combustion existed before, but we haven't really figured out yet what works
There aren't really any best practices yet and things haven't settled down into a norm, so we've got wierd and more importantly interesting stuff going on. Some of it's great, some of it.. not so much
But, the lack of any kind of best practice
- Maybe here we can reference how car designs used to be more interesting in the 60's with a huge range of colours, and now it's like 3
I think that originally, there was a little bit of a fascination from the early adopter crowd about everything AI, but it's a mistake to extrapolate that the early adopter crowd is everyone. Almost all of your customers don't care how the sausage is made.
We can see a bit of frustration of this in the mainstream with terms like "AI slop" entering peoples lexicons. Which I think is understandable from both sides, marketing deparments want to highlight what they see as revolutionary advancements in their technology and product, but from the consumer side it feels like everything is "AI" without any of the benefits promised
The thing is that AI isn't a product, or a feature, it's just a revolutionary new tool that might help us deliver things to people that have never been possible before. But, we need to focus on those product and features first
Like an excited dad with a new label maker, we're currently in the stage of walking around the house and labelling everything we can just to try out our new tool regardless of the value that it brings. We don't need to label the door as "door", it's pretty obvious
The thing is that AI/ML is a huge family of different tools (The perceptron first came around in the 1960's), methods and approaches but it's really only hit the mainstream since ChatGPT. I think that the first instinct is still to reach for those tools because they're novel but I think that's a mistake. There are a lot of statistical methods and heuristical models that can give you significant benefits while being orders of magnitude faster and cheaper. But the problem is that they're not really sexy.
How does this all relate back to products? Remember, people don't care about how the sausage is made. I love a blueberry muffin. I'm not going to pay extra for an AI blueberry muffin because the AI part doesn't interest me, now. If you tell me that the AI puts more blueberries in my muffin, or thanks to AI the muffin is 20% larger, or perhaps that using AI you can now anticipate when i'm craving a muffin and deliver one to my door. That's a different thing altogether
So where do we go from here? Talk to smart people about what your problems are, what you want your features to be and stop worrying about AI. Don't close yourself off to potentially better solutions to your problems just because you want to use your favourite new label maker
Focus on the problem, but enjoy the wild ride until it all gets stale and "optimized". AI isn't our salvation, but yeah - I think it's worth the water.