Another Thought

Jeremiah Owyang is an industry analyst based in Silicon Valley. He’s an AI booster, but he’s been around hype before. He notes that he’s “never seen such rapid evolution in such a short time.”

As Owyang puts it, small teams of programmers now can use LLMs to assemble “sentient creatures”—like a 4-year-old—in two days. They are capable of:

  • ‘Seeing’ with computer vision, what’s happening in the real world,

  • ‘Hearing’ via voice commands and ambient sounds in the real world,

  • ‘Thinking’ through processing the above real-world input,

  • ‘Learning’ by accessing the pre-trained data,

  • ‘Referencing’ exclusive data sets,

  • ‘Speaking’ with life-like audio voices, that have inflection and tone in any language,

  • ‘Writing’ through text communication, in any format or style required,

  • ‘Drawing’ by creating images spontaneously, and

  • ‘Interacting’: it can proactively engage in dialog, ask questions, or assign AI agents to complete tasks on their own.

This is extraordinary and unprecedented. Will it matter to publishing? You decide.

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