Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, famously said in 1987 that you can see the computer revolution everywhere but in the productivity statistics. But 2023 is set to be the year that finally changes, thanks to the power of artificial intelligence (AI). By the end of 2023, AI will be fast becoming one of the most important factors of production in the global economy.
AI has a history of hype followed by disappointment, but this time, thanks to the deep learning revolution, it really is different. Ordinary people everywhere will soon have access to AI with the power to give them superhuman capabilities.
Imagine needing to create a marketing brochure for a new geography that your company is entering. Trained on the data set of all the material your firm has ever created, your AI assistant creates three options for you within minutes—each beautifully written and illustrated. What used to be a weeklong project becomes the work of a couple of hours.
AI is on the cusp of giving us all superpowers. We will be able to generate an email or memo in our own voice (or anyone else’s for that matter) in seconds. We will be able to create photorealistic art—or even video—with a few bullet-points of instructions. We will be able to answer arbitrary scientific questions by having the AI “read” entire corpuses of academic literature. We will be able to delegate our bookkeeping and accounts to an AI algorithm.
This innovation will come from the usual suspects, like DeepMind and OpenAI, but also from a new generation of startups that are demonstrating that you don’t need a billion-dollar budget to get to the cutting edge of AI.
The impact of freeing up billions of hours of human labor and making creativity and knowledge too cheap to meter will be huge. Just as the advent of the internet gave every startup a vastly scalable distribution engine, the era of AI superpowers will give every startup a vastly scalable production engine. This is not a prediction about artificial general intelligence, still less about AI “replacing” humans, but it will unleash a huge wave of entrepreneurship.
What would you build with a million such “interns” in the cloud, available on demand, 24/7, and at close to zero marginal cost? In 2023, we can expect thousands of entrepreneurs to show us.