State of AI
In the next few articles, I’ll take a deep dive into how AI tools impact product development from ideation to prototyping to interviewing to delivery of a working product.
Here’s why I’m doing this.
In the product development world, AI is everywhere.
A podcast recently “recreated AirBnb” with a few clicks. Of course, this was a canned demo with limited functionality which failed even the simplest of modifications (“add a button”).
But if you just read the headlines, you’ll feel the FOMO.
So what is the state of AI right now?
Ironically, it’s a hard question to ask the AIs since their models are 4 to 10 months old and their web search capabilities will just summarize the hype causing your FOMO in the first place.
Fifteen years ago, my favorite Search Engine Optimization professional, AJ Kohn, named his consultancy, Blind Five Year Old. He was referring to Google as the “blind five year old”. As Google’s capabilities grew, we joked how it became a seeing 10 year old and so on.
Where on the human scale are AIs right now?
Certainly the publicly available AIs don’t have sentience which the words “artificial intelligence” lead us to expect.
Some figureheads of AI, like Sam Altman of OpenAI, claim AGI (“artificial general intelligence”) yet provide vague and shifting definitions of this concept (see this Stratechery podcast from last week).
So the definition of AI is flexible and the state of AI is hyped up.
To combat the FUD (“fear, uncertainty and doubt”), I’ll be doing an in-depth, hands-on exploration of the utility and the pitfalls of AI.
Stay tuned.
Jim coaches Product Management organizations in startups, growth stage companies and Fortune 100s.
He's a Silicon Valley founder with over two decades of experience including an IPO ($450 million) and a buyout ($168 million). These days, he coaches Product leaders and teams to find product-market fit and accelerate growth across a variety of industries and business models.
Jim graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Computer Science and currently lectures at University of California, Berkeley in Product Management.
