Generative AI is “the next platform”

The Future. Ready or not, the generative AI revolution is here. Any business involving words, images, sound, or code stands to gain from the new tech that Silicon Valley is calling “the next platform.” In the race to capitalize, tech companies would rather beg for forgiveness than ask for permission to deploy generative AI. Because the chance of market dominance is so tempting, Big Tech might put any negative repercussions from their large language models on the back burner until they strike gold.

What’s a platform?
In the tech industry, a platform is any foundation (with disruptive potential) for building and running business applications — from the personal computer to the Internet to the iPhone. A new platform generally emerges once every 10 years.

• What distinguishes generative AI from “next platform” candidates like the metaverse and blockchain is that users are eager to play around with these tools and stick with them.

• While companies haven’t quite figured out how to make money from generative AI, business leaders are discovering new uses, almost guaranteeing profitability.

What’s the Tweet on Silicon Valley street?

• “This is what an actual technology revolution looks like. It’s not 10 years of trying to find use cases. It’s use cases being found and productized faster than you can track them,” software veteran Dare Obasanjo recently shared on Twitter.

• Large language models like ChatGPT “represent the first tech advancement that has a potential to seamlessly deploy across 7 [billion] smartphones and thus can be a platform shift,” former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky also Tweeted.

Still, Big Tech has been referring to their generative AI tools as public tests and betas because they know they’re imperfect. If the public can overlook their flaws until all the kinks are smoothed out, Big Tech has a big hit on their hands.