A significant part of the past year of economic growth is attributable to high expectations of AI. Meanwhile, the company behind ChatGPT has released Sora, which turns text into “video” (a word that is losing its accuracy) and has a TikTok-like experience for sharing this machine-generated visual content. Cal Newport wonders whether this, and the imminent release of AI-generated “erotica,” is an inadvertent confession that the cutting edge of AI isn’t generating the breakthroughs promised:
Whether Sora lasts or not, however, is somewhat beside the point. What catches my attention most is that OpenAI released this app in the first place.
It wasn’t that long ago that Sam Altman was still comparing the release of GPT-5 to the testing of the first atomic bomb, and many commentators took Dario Amodei at his word when he proclaimed 50% of white collar jobs might soon be automated by LLM-based tools.
A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. They also wouldn’t be entertaining the idea, as Altman did last week, that they might soon start offering an age-gated version of ChatGPT so that adults could enjoy AI-generated “erotica.”
To me, these are the acts of a company that poured tens of billions of investment dollars into creating what they hoped would be the most consequential invention in modern history, only to finally realize that what they wrought, although very cool and powerful, isn’t powerful enough on its own to deliver a new world all at once.
I’ve honestly been surprised by both how useful AI products have turned out to be as well as by how much their uses resemble advanced forms of Googling. That is, I’m not sure that AI isn’t an iterative development on something the internet already does, the way cellphones were an iterative development on telephony.