Remember the late 90’s and early millennium where the phone wasn’t “smart” yet? We had flip phones, candy bar phones and sliders, each with its unique design and form factor. Some phones had larger screens, while others had just dull 2–3 lines of LCD. Some phones had full QWERTY keyboards, while most had traditional numeric keypads. There were even phones with interchangeable faceplates that allowed users to customize the appearance of their device. Basically, the mobile phone industry was undergoing a Cambrian explosion of sorts, with the emergence of many different phone factors that catered to diverse consumer needs and preferences.
The Cambrian explosion, a period of rapid evolutionary innovation and diversification of life forms that occurred about 541 million years ago during the Cambrian period, is a well-known term in biology. During this time, there was a sudden emergence of complex, multicellular organisms with hard shells, skeletons, and other complex features that had not been seen before in the fossil record. However, the term can also be used to describe the sudden emergence of multiple new and diverse product forms resulting from a new technology or innovation.
Nowadays, I kind of believe that we’re at the dawn of the Cambrian explosion of AI. It looks like following the footsteps ImageGAN and DALL·E2, ChatGPT from OpenAI just appeared out-of-nowhere and quickly break the 100 million users milestone in just in 60 days or so. Pulling the interest many companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, have integrated OpenAI’s language models into their own AI platforms, and there are numerous startups and smaller companies that have also leveraged its capabilities to build conversational AI solutions during recent period.
While the spotlights might have tilted slightly towards ChatGPT, there are tens (if not tons) of other popular AI applications at work. Pretty much “everyone” claims that they use AI in some sense (in their solutions) but I expect to see the real net effect of improvements quickly in the next few years. Many of the today’s dumb-bots around the websites will become real conversational business enablers. Creating presentations, writing essays, modifying pictures will be another Ctrl-something keyboard shortcut. Online Shopping experience will evolve; especially the search field will become more functional and steer the UI to respond to the user’s precise requirements. Hopefully online customer support will advance too — fingers crossed.
Over the course of next 2–3 years as AI continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more diverse and innovative applications emerge, strange problems to develop and new social challenges yet to occur.
March, 2023