What will AI collide with?

I was at a recent event where Rich Beaudrie posed an interesting question: what will AI collide with?

There are many examples from the past. At one point 15 years ago, we had cell phones with large screens + 3G networks + compact GPS chips and Google Maps was born.

Or you can look at things like early social networks, which combined the fact that everyone had a computer at school + the internet really taking off.

So what’s next?

Rich talked a good bit about what AI might collide with, and he sees a big intersection between AI and AR/VR technology. His role involves digital learning, and to be able to learn by conversing with an AI that is tuned to you in a VR world would be miles ahead of watching a generic video and answering questions. I think he’s quite right about a future there.

On a lighter side, I see AI coming to more video games. I have the new “College Football 25”, and it’s fantastic, but the announcers are still just dreadful. At this point, it seems that it would be fairly easy to train an AI on the voice of someone like Kirk Herbstreit and have it generate the in-game announcing on the fly. They’re still doing the process of “record 1,000 phrases and we’ll stitch them together”, and it shows. Given what GPT-4o can do with voice inflections, I could see AI working quite well for something like this.

If nothing else, Rich’s presentation has me pondering what else AI will “collide” with in the near future. So far we’re seeing it stuffed into products in rather predictable ways, but some big collisions are certainly coming.

What are some AI collisions that you think we might see in the next few years?

Originally published at https://www.mickmel.com on August 2, 2024.