Thursday: The future of productivity

Good morning Change Makers,

It's been one of the biggest weeks in AI for a long time. OpenAI released their new model, and it's pretty epic.

It could well present the start of a new era of intelligence, abundance and productivity. Don't believe me? Read on.

Will

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Have you ever watched Iron Man?

I assume most of you have, but for those who haven’t, Iron Man is a comic book character who self-describes as a “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist”. In short, he’s the person all men want to be.

His ‘superpower’ is that he wears a metal suit which is for all intents and purposes a fighter jet, in the shape of a human body. With this suit comes rockets, missiles, machine guns and one very important additional thing….JARVIS. JARVIS is his virtual assistant who provides everything Tony Stark (Iron Man) could ever need.

It sees everything he sees, hears what he hears, has infinite knowledge and perfect memory.

It is the most personal, knowledgeable, and intuitive assistant possible.

See JARVIS in action here in Iron Man 2!

This is, however, science fiction, the work of Hollywood screenwriters….or is it? 

On Monday evening this became a reality.

OpenAI released GPT-4o. Which, despite its terrible name, is the first natively multi-modal (AI jargon for it understands vision, text, speech etc, unlike ChatGPT which only understands text) model.

It has near instance response, in fact, it is so fast it often interrupts people as they try to use it.

I’d like to paint a picture of what our lives could look like once these AI models are distributed in a way that allows them to be used easily and affordably. There is an almost infinite variety of use cases, but here are a couple:

1. Teaching

Students are often told they are “visual learners” or “audio-learners” or “kinesthetic learners”. Now despite these often just being excuses for lazy kids justifying why a test went badly, there is a lot of truth that personalised teaching is advantageous.

However, the issue is that resource and time-poor teachers have to find a “one-size-fits-all approach”. They just do not have the time to pander to Jimmy’s protestations of only being able to learn by watching football highlights.

Student-tailored teaching will be the future and this new model has just taken a giant leap to getting us there. Look at this demo of Education-titan Sal Khan (big plus points if you recognise his voice!) sitting with his young son solving a maths problem.

As you can see the AI can speak to him and see his workings, just like an in-person teacher can. Unlike a teacher with another 20 pupils to look after, this “teacher” is solely focused on one student.

What this really does is it will open up, personalised, tailored education to anyone with an internet connection. This level of personal education has traditionally been reserved for those only who can afford it, but now it can truly democratise high-quality education for-all.

2. Productivity unlocks for “white-collar” work

What proportion of time spent on any single activity is composed with actions that actually get us close to that goal?

How much time does a doctor spend on actually diagnosing and treating patients?

How much time does a lawyer actually spend on considering their arguments or engaging with clients?

My guess is that 50%+ of most jobs are spent on the grunt work that has nothing to do with completing the primary task.

Let’s take the doctor analogy a step further.

If we say 50%+ of a doctor’s time is spent not working towards their real objective of helping patients, what would they be able to do if they got all this time back?

This new AI model can act as an all-knowing and totally present assistant, who can take care of all the ‘manual work’ for the doctor, with little input. This now gives the doctor not just a little bit extra time, but 2x extra time to actually help patients. (They’ve gone from 50% of their time spent on patient care to nearly 100%)

People often say we need more doctors, but instead of 2x more doctors, what happens if we just make our current doctors 2x as efficient? Just think what that world could look like.

Now apply the same logic to all industries, and you will start to paint a picture of a world totally different from ours today. A world full of abundance.

Be a Superhero

To me, this very much feels like the first time I have seen an AI product that appears to help real people, with real problems. We’ve all been promised upheaval and tremendous change with this AI revolution - I think this is the first big step.

So let’s all live our childhood dreams of being a superhero, as one very day soon we all might be.

More Resources:

Here are some top videos of this new tech in action:

Real-time Language Translation

Recognising a birthday cake and singing Happy Birthday:

Visualising environment for blind people