Is AI bullshit? Here’s how to find out

Even as tech leaders and visionaries such as Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Jodi Baxter, Debashree D. and others have attested to the potential generative AI has to remake the world, ordinary users have proven more skeptical.

The skeptics have had more ammo for their side lately, with Perplexity being called out by WIRED Magazine (where my wife works as Editor-in-Chief) for apparently scraping its content in defiance of an opt-out added to the magazine website’s robot.txt file.

In addition, OpenAI has separately faced criticism from observers and employees alike for not just its potential — and seeming desire — to disrupt “business as usual,” but also for supposedly prioritizing “shiny products” over AI safety.

That is likely a big reason why the company’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever recently left OpenAI to found a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), which is dedicated toward one goal: securing superintelligent AI models, those that eclipse artificial generalized intelligence (AGI), or AI that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.

And yet, despite the naysayers and doomsayers, AI companies and developers continue to produce groundbreaking new innovations each week.

Just this week, we saw Runway show off (though not release publicly yet) its new generative AI video model Gen-3 Alpha which may eclipse OpenAI’s Sora and the recently released Luma AI Dream Machine in terms of its capability to produce realistic, immersive, Hollywood-quality video within seconds or minutes.

Furthermore, Anthropic stole the crown from OpenAI for the most powerful AI model in the world (according to third-party benchmarks) with the release of its new Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, that some power users are already likening to showing “sparks of AGI.”

As I’ve written before, AI is clearly in the midst of its “trough of disillusionment” according to the Gartner Hype Cycle. While many AI companies have shown off undeniably impressive demos of their technology, the skeptics are pointing out the ways in which these companies scraped data and content off the web without asking permission or providing compensation, and are gleefully celebrating all of AI’s many public failures, while castigating executives for their boosterism of what is clearly still a technology with many rough edges and unclear benefits.

But does that mean the entire generative AI field is “bullshit” in the way that NFTs and the Metaverse have so far failed to find much mainstream adoption or use cases?

Not at all. In fact, many businesses from startups like Color to Fortune 500 enterprises such as Walmart are already embracing AI and seeing tangible results across a variety of domains.

Find out exactly what these companies are doing with gen AI, how it’s helping them and their customers, and what specific products, tools, and workflows they’re using at our largest annual conference: VB Transform 2024, July 9-11 at the Terra Gallery & Event Venue in San Francisco.

In attendance will be leaders at some of the most important, influential and controversial gen AI companies including:

• Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity
• Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq
• Olivier Godement, Head of Product at OpenAI
• Jieliang Hao, Head of Business at Pika
• Desirée Gosby, VP of Emerging Technology at Walmart
• Kari Ann Briski, Vice President of AI Models, Software and Service at NVIDIA
• Zac Maufe, Global Head of Regulated Industries at Google Cloud
• Colette Stallbaumer, WorkLab Cofounder and Copilot GM at Microsoft

And many, many more (70+ speakers)

I’ll be moderating panels and breakout sessions and look forward to connecting with all these business leaders and the estimated 400+ enterprise decision makers and entrepreneurs expected to attend.

There’s still a few tickets left, so go get them while you can here.