AI: Not 'AI', but 'AIs'. RTZ #347

...Billions and Billions of 'm2m' AIs. Not Singularity, but Plurality

The Bigger Picture, Sunday May 5, 2024

Approaching my 350th daily missive on AI here at ‘Reset to Zero,’ it may be time to discuss a fundamental thing we’re all racing towards in this AI Tech Wave. It’s NOT ‘AI’, but ‘AIs’. And their ‘machine to machine’ (m2m) traffic. Also, how it can be monetized at scale.

While many are obsessed about the existential and the initially job-sapping potential of AI, what may be missed, is that it’s billions and billions of AIs are coming that we should be truly excited about. Not ‘Coming for Us’, in the ‘coming for us’ sense, but ‘coming for us’ to see and do far more with just our ‘HI’, ‘Human Intelligence’.

In last Sunday’s ‘Bigger Picture’ I described how in 2024, we’re speeding away from the AI fears of 2023. In this Sunday’s ‘Bigger Picture’, I’d like to described what we’re speeding our way towards, billions and billions of AIs for us all. Yes, Carl Sagan sized ‘Billions and Billions’. Let me explain.

We’ve been conditioned by our dystopian science fiction, from ‘Skynet’ in ‘The Terminator’, to the ‘Matrix’ in the, well, ‘The Matrix’, and so many more, that there is a singular AI that takes over the world. Becomes our over-lord. Drowns us in Paperclips.

In the AI Doomerism origin stories in particular, even the inventors and governance boards of our foremost AI innovations and companies, have been dreading the existential risks of AI. But we haven’t absorbed and internalized that it’s going to be billions and billions of AIs around us soon. Multiples of AIs for every one of the 8 billion on the planet today. Certainly the 4+ billion that have access to digital technologies every day, via smartphones to the internet to the clouds and beyond.

Besides AI, the other word that has terrified singularly of late is ‘Singularity’. This time the moment that AI ‘super-intelligence’ or ‘AGI’ (artificial general intelligence), however it’s defined, surpasses us humans in intelligence, switches on Skynet style, and proceeds to work against Humanity. Yet, already, in 2024, we now have BILLIONS of daily AI generated questions being answered in the Billions via OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot/Bing, Google Gemini generated Search, Meta’s open source Llama 3 driven Meta AI, and soon Apple’s two plus billion devices in user hands everywhere. And all those AIs will get better exponentially on AI Scaling Laws, at 10x every two years at least, for the foreseeable future. That’s not Singularity whenever we get there, it’s Plurality. Of ‘AIs’.

Back in the mid 1990s, I was writing the initial Internet research reports to explain to investors, what the Internet could eventually be. And how the ultimate ‘Value Creation’ of the whole ‘techs stack’, would lead to the applications and services that eventually emerged in Box 6 of the Internet Tech Stack below. And how they would be both ‘business to consumer’ (b2c), and business to business (b2b).

(Yes, helped kick off those two early buzzy internet acronyms, b2b and b2c. Along, with ‘sticky eyeballs’, a tale for another day).

Today, as I look at my updated version of the AI Tech Stack below, I’d like to add ‘business to machine’ (b2m), ‘consumer to machine’ (c2m), and most important possibly, '‘machine to machine’ (m2m). The AI training and inference ‘reinforcement learning loops’ in the chart above are going to be comprised of those b2m, c2m, and m2m AI ‘smart agents’. What’s being actively being invented as ‘Agentic Workflows’ I wrote about recently.

For every one of us soon will be 10 or more ‘m2m’ AI agents, representing us in every field imaginable, against other agents representing other parties from every field imaginable.

We’re going from thinking about 3 plus billions users of Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatApp’, to 30 plus billions of Meta AI ‘Smart Agents’ that will be negotiating within and across networks on the behalf of the underlying humans. Same for the billions of Google users, Apple users, Amazon users, and most every tech and non-tech company as well.

Our biggest and best tech companies, large and small, are all racing to put billions of AI capabilities in our hands in so many ways. ‘Multimodal AIs’ means that we’re already experiencing it in the form of Generative AI driven text, code, voice, music, images, and now pretty impressive videos. All hitting hard at both our rational and emotional sides of our brain. And all of that is just the beginning of the beginning.

AI will just accelerate and magnify for our minds what technology has done for our other capabilities. From wheels to jets to propellers, to telephony, to the internet and so on, technologies have augmented our natural, physical capabilies. Just because probabilistic computing of LLM/Generative AI is going to get exponentially better at reasoning and creativity, simply means it allows each one of us to get better with our most important physcial part, the brain. Again, as Carl Sagan reminds us:

AI will just augment each one of us. In the billions, with billions and billions of AI ‘agents’, in all their forms. With the inner machinery being ‘m2m’ agents.

The available market for AI, is not just 8 billion humans, but 80 billion and far more AI agents, b2m, c2m and m2m. All to be monetizable via variations of the three primary mechanisms of human commerce: Transactions, Subscriptions, and of course Advertising, in all its forms. What gave us Amazon, Netflix and Google as a start, will hyperscale them all with billions and billions of AI smart agents.

In that world, the possibility of any one AI taking over the world, is as remote as any one human taking over the world. Sure, many may try, as humans have against humans for millennia. But our strength is in the exponential numbers. Billions and Billions. To start. AI at Scale, and available globally at Scale, likely REDUCES AI risks. Counter-intuitively.

That’s my source of net optimism around AI. In the Plurality of AI. Not ‘AI’, but ‘AIs’. “m2m’ and ‘m2us’, monetized at a scale of ‘orders of magnitude’ (aka OOMs) of regular human to human (h2h) internet traffic (b2b and b2c). Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)