The AI Whisperers: Navigating the Quiet Revolution in Digital Productivity

The battleground is already set. ChatGPT and other AI product usage has stalled at 200 million globally. The most important software revolution since the PC is used only by these proto-warlords of digital productivity. No one else cares and will only use AI as a bundle inside of other software products, likely the ones they already use.

This is why I used the term AI whisperers. The people who immediately grasped onto AI were not typical computer users. They were something different. A little bit divergent, gifted at language, able to peer into the workings of the machine and get it to do what they wanted through the spell casting of prompting.

The thing that has surprised me the most is how few engineers, percentage speaking, are a part of that 200 million. I've asked ALOT of engineers whether they use AI and a significant part just don't see the point. Engineering, along with legal documents (check out Spellbook) and tax preparation, seem like they will be the first disciplines to be changed significantly by AI.

The bubble is bursting as we speak. The vibe has shifted only in the last week as the 200 million AI whisperers have gotten used to their new superpower and no longer treat it as special, and the rest of humanity treats AI with a mixture of fear and ignorance.

The other determining factor is the lack of a cohesive product which shows what AI can do outside of a chatbot. GammaAI is actually a sneaky tool that I still continue to use which does the best at this, offers a vision of what an AI enabled software product can do (makes visually appealing slide decks).

OpenAI did a demo last month promising a lot of technology that hasn't actually appeared yet. Most people no longer remember what happened a month ago, but for those of us who do its important sign of the difference between marketing hype and what's actually happening. Maybe all that funny ha-ha "AGI has been achieved internally" joke as power play is just marketing hype and we will only see minor efficiency gains on the current tech.

Its important to remember that all tech companies rely on a mixture of aspirational and real progress in order to feed the tech hype machine and the whole ecosystem relies on this state of things in order to grab the money bags and get to "too big to fail". They do impressive things but they also promise impressive things and hope no one is paying attention (a good bet).

And silently in the background, Apple continues to just to not talk about what they do until they want to talk about it. Can't tell you the amount of times I heard "apple is falling behind". Apple isn't falling behind. They just don't talk about what they are building. They don't build in public.

I was a naive techno-optimist, but I learned from web 2.0 that there is talk and there is action. You can't discount all talk and you can't be aware of all action, but its really good to learn how to be street smart when listening to the talk of people who talk their own book.