In the early days of Google, when Eric Schmidt was CEO, he frequently came to the London office where our meeting rooms were named after revolutionary computers. Eric invited everyone to an all hands meeting, and just answered our questions for an hour on any topic. He talked about Google’s strategy, the future of computing (back then, Android and Cloud were the new kids on the block) and tech in general. His mantras were ‘focus on the user’ and ‘revenue solves all problems’: if you solve real problems for real people (back then, our end users, advertisers, third party website owners), the money will follow.
This TED interview reminded me of those sessions. Like Eric I lived through the 90s when the internet took off, and was at Google in the 2000s when mobile took off. Gen AI will have a bigger impact on consumers than both of those combined, and I agree with Eric that we haven’t even see a fraction of its impact on each and every one of us. The difference between LLMs and ML is that they touch consumers whereas ML was largely B2B. When consumers drive change, things happen much faster.
Search gave us information at our fingertips, accessible anywhere on our phones. I love the analogy in his talk that LLMs will give everyone DaVinci powers. What if ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude turn us all into creative multi-dimensional thinkers? As an industry it’s our responsibility to make sure AI benefits people broadly, and that we implement it responsibly.
Do you agree or disagree? Comment on my LinkedIn post here.
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Obi Felten 