Fake Smart | An Introduction

AI is a pretty big deal. I can’t overstate that. For better or for worse.

We are in the days once before only seen in movies. We are living in the early years of dream-like realities that until now have only existed in someone's imagination.

AI is everywhere. It's not just a tech trend; it's a global movement, fueled by the public amazement, and rightfully so, over the recent breakthroughs known as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALLE-3.

"How big of a deal is it", you ask?

Well, let's think about the internet. When that came to be, it was a big deal. But we didn't see the effects of that in dramatic ways in terms of mass adoption until years after it was introduced. It took a fairly long amount of time to hit critical mass.

Like many technological advances, the first version was trash. It was only popular due to it's novelty, at least as far as the average person was concerned. Once DSL rolled around and was common place, it picked up steam for sure, but depending on where you live, it was still kind of trash as recent as 10-15 years ago. Maybe even less if you live in a remote area. (I'm looking at you HughesNet).

How long did it take to hit 100 million users?
Internet: 15 years
Facebook: 4 years
ChatGPT: 8 weeks

When I finally moved on from DSL which thankfully was about 15 years ago, internet had become a utility at that point. It was used and needed so often that having a bad internet connection was not an option I was willing to consider anymore. I didn't care what it cost. I had to have it and it had to work. It didn't have to be incredible, just functional. Nah. But alas, it wasn't in the (network) cards.

I hated that internet. It required this unfortunate routine of walking to the kitchen literally every hour or two every single day to reset the little $8 modem I rented from them for $5 a month for 2 years. When we finally moved to an area with cable and I called to cancel that internet, the customer service rep asked, "What would it take to get you to remain a customer of Atrocious, Tragic & Terrible DSL Service?"

Without hesitation, I said, "An act of God".

Good Times. Anyway, where was I?

Internet. Got it.

So, again the internet was big. We had the smartphone come through and disrupt things in ways that most would deem positive, I believe, but in more of an indirect way. Plus, the smart phone was sort of an inevitability in most ways. We all knew computers were getting smaller and smaller. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to put 2 and 2 together on this one. It wasn't a novel idea when Apple introduced the iPhone. It had been done before. It was less about the smart phone and more about the app store in terms of things that really shook stuff up.

But not like this.

AI is on a different level than both of those by a significant margin. It’s a giant leap forward. Computers are pulling off tricks nobody dreamed up prior to now, and they're doing it way ahead of time. Someday soon Data Scientists around the world are going to be posting video shorts on whatever app it's popular to do so at the time, popping bottles of champagne and dancing while "Started from the bottom" by Drake plays in the background.

The past year to a year and a half has just been a whirlwind of breakthrough after breakthrough. Mind blowing thing after mind blowing thing. It seemed like it came out of nowhere, and it shows no signs of slowing any time soon. Quite likely it will be the opposite. After all, we are ahead of schedule. By a fair amount. Roughly 10-12 years in my estimation. Give or take a few years.

How did I come up with that?

Let's rewind to 2014. While we were all going about our lives, dancing and singing along to Fancy by Iggy Azalea, Google was out buying a company called DeepMind. They had a pretty lofty goal which was to get a computer to take input visually with no advanced knowledge or help given, and see if it could learn how to play the ancient Chinese game "Go".

Doesn't sound that crazy though, right? Computers had beaten human chess players before.

What's the difference?

But that's not the end of it. If that went well, step 2 explored the question, "could we get it to play against itself and learn from it's mistakes and in essence eventually iterate it's way into game mastery, and if so could it master this game at a level where it could potentially challenge the world champion of Go? The one caveat to the approach being that the AI couldn't just attempt to predict the outcomes. It needed to find a different way.

Therein lies the key distinction that separates the two use cases. Chess in comparison to Go has a relatively small number of possible moves and therefore outcomes. Each move in chess can be literally calculated to a precise value to definitively and quantitatively say what the best possible move is statistically or on average. Go doesn't have those limits.

In fact there are exponentially more possible outcomes for any one move in Go than the computer would ever be able to calculate in a timely fashion. It would take years, and that renders game play against a human a no go. So, in order to win, the computer would have to learn to play the game the way humans play: Intuition.

Can a computer mirror human intuition?

It was projected that it would be close to 2025 when a computer would be able to mirror human intuition. And the fact that I'm telling you this story, you likely have guessed, they pulled it off. In 2016, just two years after Google acquired the company, they beat the world champion in the game.

Now, here we are today and it almost is 2025 and AI isn't just playing Go; It's composing music. It's creating virtual art. Its replicating or mimicking human outputs in several categories (with some work to be done in others), but to gain that much ground (critical mass) in 8 weeks is nothing short of amazing. What happened during that time is it caused people to take a step back and take notice.

But then some people have noticed. Some people just don't get it. My kids don’t get it. They watch Midjourney create a realistic photo of a chimpanzee standing in a group of people with a cell phone in his hands simply because I asked it to, and they barely bat an eye.

“Cool”.

That's all. Just, “cool”. And not an enthusiastic one either.

But this level of tech that’s available to us these days that is nothing short of magical are just normal incremental updates to them. I guess we have a tendency to do that as humans. In hindsight every breakthrough just looks like an obvious next step in the evolution of some technology, but that's such an unappreciative and ungrateful way to look at it, isn't it?

Case in point: Wireless communications.

What?

How?

If you told a person 100 years ago that you could make something react literally on the other side of the world from a device in your pocket, you would be laughed out of town or committed. I can't imagine how hard of a problem that was to solve.

If someone came to me and said, “we need you to create a device that can transmit a computer signal wirelessly”, I wouldn’t even know where to begin thinking about that much less know what might help me get it done. No shot.The fact that we have that technology is nothing short of miraculous but no one cares. It’s normal now.

That’s how my kids think about AI right now. They don’t grasp the magic happening right before their eyes. I tell them, this isn’t some picture being fetched from the depths of the darkweb where we keep the candids of the mid-evolutioners; it’s being made-to-order just for us, right now, off the top, and doing so in less time than it used to take for AOL to rage scream a jpeg through a phone line to my furniture sized PC.

The moral to this story is: it’s happening. Right now, and its pretty incredible already. It’s only going to get better and faster from here. You can try to stop it, but who are you kidding? You can’t. It’s time to buy in or get left behind. The train is leaving the station. Are you getting on?

I'll leave you with the answers to the questions posed in the description:

What's this website about?
This site is devoted to some of my interests, namely various creative endeavors I am involved in and tech. Fake Smart is a synonym for Artificial Intelligence, if that was unclear.

Who am I?
I am a Husband to my wife Marcia and Father to our two boys, Caden and Jack. I work as a Data Engineer. Before that I worked in sales at the same company. Before that I managed a restaurant. My interests include technology, particularly AI, Writing and Producing Music (This is what I went to college for), Writing Books or Articles and I even have a RedBubble store where you can buy my designs printed on a myriad of cool things.

Why should you care?
You shouldn't.

You should check out my RedBubble store though.