2 years after AI went mainstream - turns out the joke's on us

August 2022 the first version of Stable Diffusion was released to the public. November 2022, it was time for people to have their first conversation with ChatGPT. Soon, it will be three years that general AI applications (mostly image generation and Large Language Models) have entered our public lives.

And what can we say about this technological advancement, today?

After being screamed on by random people in the comments on LinkedIn and Facebook for just mentioning “AI”.

After being ridiculed by photographers for the unrealistic output and six fingered hands on the images that we generated with Midjourney.

After being penalized by Google for using LLM-generated content on our website, despite Google telling us that AI-generated content per-se is not considered bad.

After barely being able to write a clunky TODO-app with Github Copilot and ChatGPT.

We finally arrived at a state of perfection.

Our AI-generated giveaway documents are farming hundreds of follows and connections on X and LinkedIn.

We now see a bunch of hot, definitely real Milfs with 5 fingers on their hands popping out everywhere on Instagram.

In fact, the images have been stitched together to videos, and now we have the marvel of fantastic animal encounters, where children ride tigers, and ship workers clean whales with huge brushes.

We are vibe-coding browser games with metaverse-like portals to other games.

Jobs (and whole industries) are being crushed by automations.

And for sure, if not for anything else, developers now finally can replace thousands of if-else statements that include Regular Expressions with a single OpenAI API call.

While this is an almost anecdotal perspective on the AI (r)evolution so far, for Poe’s law sake let me make one thing very clear:

AI has come a very long way already, in an exorbitantly short time. While a lot of practical application that we see and hear about may seem useless or ridiculous, it’s just part of the exploration process. You bet there are some serious applications happening (subjective judgement, obviously).

NVIDIAs sheer market performance (not talking about the stock) is a very clear hint where we are headed. Apple and most other global brands have already adopted AI in a vast array of their processes and even consumer-facing products.

From here, we are looking at the obliteration of corporate. Of industries and business models. We are looking at the uprising of robots (sooner than you think), and a world that we have only seen in movies and computer games is approaching fast.

I think we may have truly underestimated AI. Even those of us who took it very serious.