Michael Watkins, AI and a Death Watch for Google

This week I had the honor of hosting a meeting with Michael Watkins as part of the Calix Leadership Series. Michael wrote The First 90 Days, my vote for the most influential business book ever written. During our prep, we dived into a discussion on AI (Which involved me asking lots of questions). In his words, it has already transformed how he works and is his go-to tool, compressing hours of work into minutes. I have had the same experience.

I enjoyed his writing on the AI topic:

• Implementing Generative AI
• AI-enabled executives: how ChatGPT will sharpen strategic thinking

I agree with him, another industrial revolution-sized change in work is on the way. The Economist did a great paper on AI and the future of work, making it simple to understand and ending with this statement:

llms (Large Language Models) are already incredibly powerful and have improved so quickly that many of those working on them have taken fright. The capabilities of the biggest models have outrun their creators’ understanding and control. 

If you want to go deeper, I found Terry Sejnowski 's Deep Learning Revolution an interesting history of the evolution of AI (From algorithms to deep learning).

This brings me to Google , which I have stated reminds me of turn-of-the-century Microsoft . A core product that funds a never-ending list of failed attempts to diversify the business. Google Work (blah), a laggard in the cloud, and now .. a legit threat to the search cash cow.

Their recent admission that they are losing the AI race, multiple AI leader losses, the press around their ethics-be-damned launch of Bard, and the fact that Microsoft has GPT-4 launched in Bing (I (shock) downloaded their Edge browser on my Mac as that is the only way to use GPT-4 Bing) and MS CoPilot is coming (As an Office 365 lover, I am VERY excited about the massive impact this will have on productivity) ... WOW. The bad news is piling up.

Below is my illustration of the significance of this threat, where ChatGPT makes Google Search look obsolete.

First the massively substandard Google search:

Now ChatGPT:

Tick tock. Tick tock.

Can't wait for our CoPilot test to begin, our LLM betas have been underway for 4 years .. first GPT-1, 2, 3, 4, while testing others at the same time in our platform.

Tick tock.