What the heck comes after Generative AI?

AI with ALLIE

The professional’s guide to quick AI bites for your personal life, work life, and beyond.

March 5, 2024

This edition of the newsletter will talk about the concepts that are shaping the future of business over maybe even the next few decades: CI/CD principles, Life 3.0, and adaptive business ecosystems.

I’m headed to Austin and Raleigh for work this week, so I’m hankering for any food recs.

Plus, I’ve got a 100% free webinar this Friday: How to use AI to 10x your productivity ⚡️

But first, if you're curious about what lies beyond the digital horizon and how to gear up for the Evolution Age, you're in the right place. Let's explore the blueprint for tomorrow's success, today.

From the Digital Age to the Evolution Age

In futurist circles, I get asked what comes after the Digital Age (aka the age that we are in now, and maybe have another 10-15 years in).

My short answer (and still an educated guess): the Evolution Age.

What is the Evolution Age?

“Life 3.0” is a concept popularized by Max Tegmark — his popular-in-nerd-circles book on the topic came out in 2017 and he continues to be a top AI speaker, like joining as a guest on the Smartless podcast.

Life 1.0 is the idea of biological life evolving naturally (aka the way we’ve been doing it for thousands of years). It’s about adapting physically over generations through natural selection. And it’s why we no longer have tails and why we now have opposable thumbs. Certainly makes it easier to sit and play Nintendo.

Life 2.0 is like Life 1.0 going to school, it’s about cultural life. Life 2.0 can both adapt its “hardware” (i.e. body) through evolution and can also redesign its “software” (e.g., skills) through learning, sharing with others, communicating, and cultural evolution.

Life 3.0 does not truly exist today (though some folks will argue this, and I’ll include a few examples below) and is when a system can update both its hardware and software. It's about beings that can change their bodies or minds as easily as you can download an app or learn to play the guitar.

In addition to Tegmark’s Life 3.0, the book that cracked my head open on this topic was Biofabrication by my friend, MIT professor, and Forbes 30 under 30 Science recipient, Dr. Ritu Raman. Sections of the book include lab-grown meat and leather, tissue engineering, biohybrid machines, and the ethical implications of biofabrication. It’s short and despite being very technical, there’s enough non-technical bits in there to get a ton of value out of it.

So literally, the merger of human and machine.

I know, weird.

Some of you will laugh it off.

It’s easy to pigeonhole this movement and say it’s just happening in fringe groups, like diehard Neuralink fans or Silicon Valley longevity experiments.

But endless adaptation is happening in the business space too.

If you’ve followed me for a few years, you know I often apply product management principles into my personal life, like making weighted algorithms for everything. But keen observers of my channels will also spot that I do the reverse: I think about how businesses function as a living system or organism.

The term “continuous integration” was first used by Grady Booch, a legend in the software space and co-inventor of UML, in the 90s. Fun fact: Grady’s birthday was last week, so send him a nice Twitter DM.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment, or CI/CD, really came to the forefront in the 2010s. CI/CD is the concept that software can be developed, tested, and deployed into a live environment with high frequency and automation, minimizing the lifecycle of code from ideation to production.

Said another way: rather than doing big things all at once and checking in on it 5 years later; do mini bits super duper frequently.

Similar to the concept of Life 3.0, CI/CD is about continuous, or even real-time, adaptation that doesn’t take centuries (like in the Life 1.0 example) or years (like in an old school SaaS view). Over the last several years, there has been a subtle yet significant shift in Silicon Valley, beginning with developers and gradually influencing entire organizations, towards embracing a "CI/CD everything" mentality.

I saw it at IBM years ago when we changed our sprint planning process.

I saw it in Bangalore in 2019 when I met with scrum managers moving into AI.

I saw it with the AI startups that I advised at AWS for years.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m a kook who just cracks on about AI all day? It ain’t just me—others see this transition to “CI/CD everything” too, like Sam Altman. Here’s his tweet on iteration from 6 years ago and this video clip of him from 6 years ago.

The moat I like to invest in is speed of iteration.

It leads to improved compound growth velocity, and indirectly, better protection against market volatility.

Imagine you start with a company today valued at $1 million, aiming for continuous improvement. And you consider two growth strategies over the next two years: earning a 1% gain daily versus a 90% gain every quarter. The results are dramatically different after two years. The company pursuing tiny daily gains soars to a $1.4 billion valuation, while the one opting for bigger quarterly gains only reaches $170 million.

The concepts of "Life 3.0" and "CI/CD everything" underscore a transformation towards a reality where everything is constantly updated or in a state of perpetual evolution, where adaptation and evolution are constants.

And I think we’re poised to see an expansion of Life 3.0 in products and services where we’re not just deploying…I don’t know…real-time devops for document intelligence (that’s cool and all, but small potatoes)—we could be proactively designing our hardware, our systems, and our economies.

Think (and this is decades out, in my opinion) real-time adaptive business models. The idea is that all aspects of business and, eventually, human life will become adaptive, dynamic entities akin to living organisms. This includes everything from the tools we use, the processes we follow, our documentation, and our WHOLE businesses. Even our literal employees.

Have you ever heard of Neil Harbisson? He is the world’s first recognized cyborg. He’s colorblind (me too!) and implanted an antenna in his skull so he could hear colors (not me too!). I watched a documentary on him years ago on an American Airlines flight, and he’s also got an interesting TED Talk. I am all about taking a proactive role in crafting and molding my ideal life, and one of Neil’s quotes frequently plays in my head: “Design yourself”.

And I think that’s the blueprint for tomorrow.

Why does it matter?

It’s not only about staying current with technology or adopting the latest AI tool. We need to begin fundamentally rethinking how we structure businesses, how they operate, and how they grow in an increasingly VUCA (read: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world with AI-first businesses.

Everything within an organization must be capable of rapid adaptation and evolution, mirroring the biological processes that sustain life itself.

Because change is constant. And change itself is changing.

It took Gmail 5 years to hit 100M users. It took ChatGPT 5 days. Starting in 1998, it took 16 years for AI to outperform humans on handwriting recognition. And starting in 2018, it took less than 2 years for AI to outperform humans on language understanding. (Source: TIME)

That’s why sorting out how you will handle the increasing rate of change is one of the most critical things for businesses today.

What culture, people, methodologies, and structures are you setting up NOW to be 10x, or even 1000x, more agile and adaptive in the future?

Because if you have to get approval from 10 people to send a basic email, your business is in jeopardy.

For those who may be curious, I've been using insights from my 'Enterprise AI Mastery Toolkit' for some of the strategies we've discussed today. If you want a deeper peak into AI implementation, use case development, responsible AI policy creation, and more, then check it out here. Or get it included in my course.

And as always: stay curious, stay informed,

Allie

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Tools, courses, and blogs that caught my eye:

Over the last few weeks, I’ve pulled together some of the top releases, and my take on each one. Check it out.

1. Enterprise AI Use Case Advisor GPT — a GPT (developed by moi) meant to help users walk through their AI use case. Just type “help” and the GPT will do the heavy lifting for you (try it) (watch demo)

2. Becoming an AI-Enhanced Human — my FREE 5-day educational email course on using AI tools to streamline daily tasks and boost efficiency overnight (with no experience required) (sign up)

3. Mistral Au Large le Chat — Mistral recently unveiled "Au Large," their latest AI model. It’s already outscored GPT-3.5 on MMLU and has one of the strongest performances in math benchmarks. Expect to hear a lot more about high-accuracy math, as it’s a requirement for more complex models (my thoughts)(try it)

4. Large World Models in AI — my insights on AI's evolution towards simulating real-world dynamics for predictive accuracy, featuring OpenAI's Sora, Meta's I-JEPA & V-Jepa, and UC Berkeley's research (learn it)

5. Billion-Token Context Windows — a look at the rapid expansion of context length in AI models from GPT-2 to GPT-4-Turbo and beyond, highlighting my and the industry's expectation for a 10,000x increase in context capabilities (my thoughts)(read it)

6. Sustainable AI Progress - basically “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” but for LLMs. Microsoft researchers have developed a method to train future LLMs more efficiently, reducing size, cost, and environmental impact. This breakthrough is laid out in “The Era of 1-bit LLMs: All Large Language Models are in 1.58 Bits” and could lower barriers to LLM development and potentially lead to more sustainable AI practices (my thoughts) (read it)

7. Viral HeyGen AI Avatar Video — my January video with a HeyGen AI Allie avatar has taken over my notifications, amassing over 8 million views. I posted it to educate others on the state of this tech, and I’m glad people are sharing their thoughts. AI builders and businesses need to take note of the negative reaction to this tech—approx 70% of the comments are “I hate this/the world is over” (watch it)

8. AI for Business Leaders course — if you liked my free email course, you’ll love my ‘AI for Business Leaders’ course. It’s the #1 AI Business course on Maven and has hundreds of happy students. Leaders from Disney, Apple, Google, Stripe, Oracle, General Mills, CVS, Novartis, and JP Morgan Chase have already signed up. Get all of your AI leadership essentials in 40 video modules and a big live Q&A to close it out (sign up with $100 off discount)

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