As forecast by numerous visionaries, and as posted here at PSA around 2014-2015 reviewing the book “The Second Machine Age”, innovation has entered the portion of the graph where exponential realities exist…change is happening so quickly the graph over time seems to be pointing more or less straight up. This is unprecedented and challenges us to learn how to live in such a world.
There is a lot of “chatter” in AI circles about 2025 being the year of the Great Leap Forward for AI, with various scenarios for achieving AGI predicted to arrive soon, and to be arriving now. The “Stargate” project announcement puts some “reality tokens” behind that idea, as it’s about making the financial commitments needed to bring the Great Leap Forward about.
Musk says they don’t have the $$$.
OpenAI, Softbank, Oracle et al say they do, at least a good beginning chunk of it. But as we know, Stargate is just one of many rapidly improving AI projects both by and through the big tech powers, but also through OpenSource initiatives.
OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil was recently interviewed by a Wall Street Journal reporter and he makes the point about exponential change several times, giving an example of stages where costs of the LLM models were reduced by 100% while greatly increasing their intelligence and capability.
Most significantly, he states that the time for those changes to occur is becoming shorter and shorter and shorter. Which is likely behind the thinking of 2025 being “the year” with super intelligent AI following closely behind the achievements of AGI. When the AI is smart enough it can figure out on it’s own how to make itself even smarter…thats the AGI to SGI step expected some time sooner than later.
OpenAI continues to state that two of the most useful areas of AI innovation they are trying to support are education and healthcare. This suggests that EdTech innovators, and healthcare visionaries, will need to greatly expand their imagination as to what SGI implies for these fields. At a minimum, the current job descriptions and career occupations in both education and healthcare are primed for tremendous disruption.
Which of course makes it hard for those developing EdTech to grasp what they really should be working on, if the capital required is on the Stargate level of investment, and if the ensuing space for mid level EdTech developers to exist becomes circumscribed by the tech powers that be.
However that plays out, and OpenSource suggests it’s not necessarily predictable that the tech powers will have all the power, the larger question is how an EdTech product can be marketed during a period of such rapid tech based obsolescence.
This also puts PSA in a humbling position, where it isn’t really possible to have clear vision and to speculate reliably about the future…when change is happening so rapidly. However there is a place for creating positive foundations for such rapid change. There are things to learn about coping and thriving on the exponential curve, and we are “on the road to find out” what they are.