This is why I disagree with a lot of people who imagine an “AI transformation” in the economic productivity sense happening instantaneously once the models are sufficiently advanced.
For AI to make really serious economic impact, after we’ve exploited the low-hanging fruit around public Internet data, it needs to start learning from business data and making substantial improvements in the productivity of large companies.
Definitely agree that private business data could advance capabilities if it were made available/accessible. Unsupervised Learning over all private CAD/CAM data would massively improve visuo-spatial reasoning which current models are bad at. Real problems to solve would be similarly useful as ground truth for reinforcement learning. Not having that will slow things down.
Once long(er) time horizon tasks can be solved though I expect rapid capabilities improvement. Likely a tipping point where AIs become able to do self-directed learning.
There is … so much hardware out there that can be bought cheaply and then connected to with basic soldering skills. In some cases, if soft-unbricking is possible, just buy and connect to ethernet/usb/power.
Revenue?
There’s a long tail (as measured by commercial value) of real world problems that are more accessible. On one end you have the subject of your article, software/devices/data at big companies. On the other, obsolete hardware whose mastery has zero value, like old hard disks. The distribution is somewhat continuous. Transaction costs for very low value stuff will set a floor on commercial viability but $1K+ opportunities are everywhere in my experience.
Not all companies will be as paranoid/obstructive. A small business will be happy using AI to write interface software for some piece of equipment to skip the usual pencil/paper --> excel-spreadsheet step. Many OEMs charge ridiculous prices for basic functionality and nickel and dime you for small bits of functionality since only their proprietary software can interface with their hardware. Reverse engineering software/firmware/hardware can be worth thousands of dollars. So much of it is terrible. AI competent at software/firmware/communication reverse engineering could unlock a lot of value from existing industrial equipment. OEMs can and are building new equipment to make this harder but industrial equipment already sold to customers isn’t so hardened.
IOT and home automation is another big pool of solvable problems. There’s some overlap between home automation and industrial automation. Industrial firmware/software complexity is often higher, but AI that learns how to reverse engineer IOT wireless microcontroller firmware could probably do the same for a PLC. Controlling a lighbulb is certainly easier than controlling a CNC lathe but similar software reverse engineering principles apply and the underlying plumbing is often similar.
Definitely agree that private business data could advance capabilities if it were made available/accessible. Unsupervised Learning over all private CAD/CAM data would massively improve visuo-spatial reasoning which current models are bad at. Real problems to solve would be similarly useful as ground truth for reinforcement learning. Not having that will slow things down.
Once long(er) time horizon tasks can be solved though I expect rapid capabilities improvement. Likely a tipping point where AIs become able to do self-directed learning.
find technological thing: software/firmware/hardware
Connect the AI to it robustly.
For hardware, AI is going to brick it, either have lots of spares or be able to re-flash firmware at will
for software this is especially easy. Current AI companies are likely doing a LOT of RL on programming tasks in sandboxed environments.
AI plays with the thing and tries to get control of it
can you rewrite the software/firmware?
can you get it to do other cool stuff?
can the artefact interact with other things
send packets between wifi chips (how low can round trips time be pushed)
make sound with anything that has a motor
Some of this is commercially useful and can be sold as a service.
Hard drives are a good illustrative example. Here’s a hardware hacker reverse engineering and messing with the firmware to do something cool.
There is … so much hardware out there that can be bought cheaply and then connected to with basic soldering skills. In some cases, if soft-unbricking is possible, just buy and connect to ethernet/usb/power.
Revenue?
There’s a long tail (as measured by commercial value) of real world problems that are more accessible. On one end you have the subject of your article, software/devices/data at big companies. On the other, obsolete hardware whose mastery has zero value, like old hard disks. The distribution is somewhat continuous. Transaction costs for very low value stuff will set a floor on commercial viability but $1K+ opportunities are everywhere in my experience.
Not all companies will be as paranoid/obstructive. A small business will be happy using AI to write interface software for some piece of equipment to skip the usual pencil/paper --> excel-spreadsheet step. Many OEMs charge ridiculous prices for basic functionality and nickel and dime you for small bits of functionality since only their proprietary software can interface with their hardware. Reverse engineering software/firmware/hardware can be worth thousands of dollars. So much of it is terrible. AI competent at software/firmware/communication reverse engineering could unlock a lot of value from existing industrial equipment. OEMs can and are building new equipment to make this harder but industrial equipment already sold to customers isn’t so hardened.
IOT and home automation is another big pool of solvable problems. There’s some overlap between home automation and industrial automation. Industrial firmware/software complexity is often higher, but AI that learns how to reverse engineer IOT wireless microcontroller firmware could probably do the same for a PLC. Controlling a lighbulb is certainly easier than controlling a CNC lathe but similar software reverse engineering principles apply and the underlying plumbing is often similar.