Even people not in tech seemed to have heard of Sam Altman’s ouster from OpenAI on Friday. I was with two friends the next day (one works in construction and the other in marketing) and both were talking about it. Generative AI (genAI) seems to have finally gone mainstream.
What it hasn’t done, however, is escape the gravitational pull of BS, as Alan Blackwell has stressed. No, I don’t mean that AI is vacuous, long on hype, and short on substance. AI is already delivering for many enterprises across a host of industries. Even genAI, a small subset of the overall AI market, is a game-changer for software development and beyond. And yet Blackwell is correct: “AI literally produces bullshit.” It makes up stuff that sounds good based on training data.
