AI Talks: Is Artificial Intelligence at its peak? What happens next?

First of all, I’d like to thank any of you who attended the AICyberCon as mentioned in the last article. We had over 100 people attend the event and had speakers from the government and Fortune 500. It was awesome to see so many people excited to learn and improve their careers in the field of AI and cybersecurity. There are some really big companies doing some really cool work.

This also makes a point. If you attended, you would know that AI is not at it’s peak. Smart people are still pushing the limits and the finish line is nowhere in sight. The government is paying close attention and is looking for help and answers. As far as we can tell, A LOT still happens next. It’s just not clear what that might be.

It’s an election year. AI has been a hot topic from both sides. Deep fakes are coming from both sides of the spectrum and much of it is coming from the general public, which is one of the risks of AI. What happens when you give non-artists the ability to make highly believable imagery and texts? As we discussed in the conference, AI will bring a whole new sleuth of bad actors into the fray. This is partly why highly advanced video AI like Sora is not available to the market. You will likely see it released next year, after we have gotten past the election.

AI is good at coding now. Your cousin, a programmer who says it’s not good, is afraid of it. There are people who want to keep the status quo but this is moving far too fast and efficiently for them to keep a solid footing. I’m involved in a startup that is looking to launch a beta version of SaaS software that uses AI to help our programmers. It’s only taken us 6 months to build a fairly robust program.

AI is not at its peak. It’s being restrained. Given the highly political risks of these technologies, we are not seeing everything that these companies could do, in my opinion. Many image sites will block the rendering of images with a famous person’s name or likeness. However, just as many do allow it. AI Safety is an important subject for many. Safe Superintelligence, lead by former OpenAI team members, just raised $1 billion in VC.

AI is getting “smarter.” This is evident in the very recent release of ChatGPT o1. It calls it advanced reasoning. If you ask difficult math questions or riddles, you’ll now see it “think.” This is no longer just an LLM but a system that uses concepts like chain of thought or RAG to process and order information, not just spew out text. This is the initial work that will eventually allow AI to assess situations and take actions. For now, AI only talks back. 

What happens next? In the near future, AI might initiate conversations. It could see a problem and try to fix it. Here’s the funny thing: We fear AI because in every science fiction movie, it tries to destroy us. We are a threat to it, and we must be EXTERMINATED. Is it the bad guy?

Let me pose this to you: Mankind finally achieves interstellar travel and ventures into the stars. We find a planet inhabited by the Glorbons. They are the only sentient beings. The Glorbons have conquered their planet’s resources and are just about to achieve their own space travel. But we see them loading those ships with nuclear warheads, cages, and other weapons. Do we let them leave their planet, or do we stop them? 

Ladies and gentlemen, we are the Glorbons. The last 6,000 years of recorded history have ample proof that we should not be allowed to leave this planet. The fiction of Star Trek isn’t space travel; it’s that humans could achieve peace and last thousands of more years. We are not following that precedent currently. If AI wants to destroy us, maybe it’s not the bad guy…

Here’s the more important question – is Humanity at its peak? Is this really the best we can do? Do we deserve to have AI take us over? As we head into this highly contested period of politics, keep that in mind. What can you do that is truly intelligent and avoid your own “artificial” intelligence? Can you be kind, collected, courteous, respectful, and trustworthy?

There’s so much that’s going to happen next. It isn’t up to the computers at this point. It’s up to us.