Why is the field of AI exploding now?
After all, it was first discussed in 1956 at a Dartmouth Conference 67 years ago! And the first deep-learning-like algorithms were described in 1965...
So why are we seeing the powerful emergence of AI today?
That’s the topic of today’s blog: an exploration of four key reasons and what this means for you as an entrepreneur and leader.
Let’s dive in…
NOTE: If you want to better understand AI and how to use the technology to go big, create wealth, and increase your impact on the world… then join me at my upcoming Abundance360 Summit in March.
The AI Renaissance: Why Now?
As mentioned earlier in this blog series, one attribute of exponentially growing technologies is that they initially appear to be growing deceptively slow, and then, almost suddenly, become disruptive.
The same has been true for AI.
But beyond that explanation, there are four principal reasons underlying the rapid emergence of AI today that are worth exploring.
The first reason is computational power: While accessible computation has been doubling every 12 to 24 months for the past 50+ years (Moore’s Law), it is only recently (since ~2015) that there has been enough computational power to run today’s powerful deep learning algorithms.
Second is the massive amount of labeled data that we humans have created and uploaded. Global data has been doubling approximately every two years and is expected to reach 175 zettabytes (i.e., 175 billion-million-megabytes) in 2025. Not only is this a large amount of data, but much of it is also labeled data which has been used to enable the training of today’s large language models (LLMs).
Third is the rapidly demonetizing cost of training AI systems. The cost to train these AI systems plummeted 99.5% from 2017 to 2022.
The fourth and final driver for today’s AI dominance is the massive amount of capital investment being made by venture funds, corporations, and governments. According to Stanford University’s AI Index Report, corporations alone invested $190 billion in AI last year—a 13x increase over a decade ago. PwC estimates that AI could add $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
For several decades, AI has been gradually integrated into a range of diverse sectors, from healthcare to manufacturing. However, it was the recent creation of generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) from OpenAI and Alphabet that has truly revolutionized the digital landscape.
Much like how Mosaic in 1993 and Netscape in 1994 represented a transformative "User Interface Moment"—democratizing web creation and consumption by making the web easy to use introducing graphics and replacing Unix with Windows—ChatGPT has emerged as a defining User Interface Moment for AI. Built upon OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 LLMs, ChatGPT made it effortlessly intuitive for anyone to harness the power of these advanced models. The result? A staggering 100 million users flocked to it in merely two months, marking an epoch in late 2022.
And, of course, these technologies are not slowing down. As of the writing of this blog, OpenAI’s GPT-5 is on the near-term horizon and just this past week Google launched its next-generation foundation model known as Gemini. At the same time, new AI models like Liquid Neural Networks by liquid.ai are under development, promising significant improvements beyond today’s generative pre-trained transformers.
The future is most definitely faster than any might think!
Why This Matters
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has said, “Artificial intelligence could have more profound implications for humanity than electricity or fire.”
I agree. The way I put it, perhaps more bluntly, is:
“By the end of this decade there are going to be two kinds of companies: those that are fully utilizing AI and those that are out of business.”
The choice is yours.
In the coming years, it will be the entrepreneurs, creators, and leaders who work with technology that will have the most impact.
We have an enormous opportunity to use AI for good.
What will you create? How will YOU uplift humanity?
In our next blog on this AI Metatrend, I’ll be looking at two examples of how AI is increasingly integrated into various industries.