The one-year anniversary of ChatGPT was at the end of November 2023. The preceding year, 2022, was a landmark year with the release of Stable Diffusion for images and ChatGPT for text.

The world as we know it has since changed dramatically.

So, what have we learned in the past year or so from the whiplash rollercoaster ride we now call generative AI?

(Editor's note: This article is adapted from Christopher Penn's Almost Timely Newsletter. You can find the original version here. It discusses three major artificial intelligence (AI) trends and offers three related sets of takeaways and advice to knowledge workers, businesses, and even policymakers.)

1. AI came to the masses

The first and most important thing that generative AI really changed is that nontechnical, noncoding people got an onramp to AI.

We've had AI for decades, and we've had very sophisticated, capable, and powerful AI for the 20 years. However, that power has largely been locked away behind very high technical restrictions: You had to know how to code in Python, R, Scala, or Julia, among others, to make the most of it.

Today, you code in plain language. Every time you give an instruction to Bing, Bard, Claude, or ChatGPT, you are coding. You are writing code to create what you hope is a reliable, reproducible result in the same way that a programmer who writes in Python hopes.

The implications of that change are absurdly large, almost too big to imagine, and we're only at the very beginning of that change.

Clay Shirky once said that a tool becomes societally interesting once it becomes technologically boring, but AI is defying that trend. It's still technologically interesting, but its simplicity and ease of use make it societally interesting as well.

And those societal changes are only beginning to be felt.

Recently, I was on a call with a colleague who said their company's management laid off 80% of their content marketing team, citing AI as the replacement for the human workers. Now, I suspect that is an edge case for the moment: Unless that team's content was so bad that AI was an improvement, I find it difficult to believe the management knew what AI was and was not capable of.

2. Most people don't know what AI can and can't do

That raises the second major thing we've learned in the last year: The general public doesn't really have a concept of what AI is and is not capable of.

The transformers architecture that powers today's language models is little more than a token guessing machine: It can take in a series of arbitrary pieces of data called tokens (in language models, those tokens correspond to 4 letter pieces of words), and then they attempt to predict what the next set of tokens would be in any given sequence. That's all they are: They are not sentient, not self-aware; they have no agency; and they are incapable of even basic things, such as math (just ask any of them to write a 250 word blog post and you'll almost never get exactly 250 words).

The general public, however, seems under the impression that these AI tools are all-knowing, all-powerful magic wands that will usher in a world like either Star Trek or Skynet—and the various AI companies have done little to rein in various such expectations. In fact, a substantial number of people have gone on at length about the existential threat AI poses.

AI doesn't pose world-ending threats in its current form. A word-guessing machine isn't going to do much else besides guess words.

Now, can you take that and put it into an architecture with other components to create dangerous systems? Sure, in the same way that you can take a pressure cooker and do things with it to turn it into an explosive device. But the pressure cooker, by itself, isn't going to be the cause of mass destruction.

To be clear: there are major threats that AI poses—but not because the machines are suddenly sentient. Two of the major, serious, and very-near-future threats that very few people want to talk about are...

1. Structural unemployment
2. Income inequality

Imminent AI Risk: Structural Unemployment

AI is capable of automating significant parts of jobs, especially entry-level jobs in which tasks are highly repetitive. Any kind of automation thrives in a highly repetitive context, and today's language models do really well with repetitive language tasks. We've previously not been able to automate those tasks because there's variability in the language, even if there isn't variability in the task. With language models' abilities to adapt to language, those tasks are now up for automation—everything from call center jobs all the way up to the CEO delivering talks at a board meeting. (sit on any earnings call and the execs largely spout platitudes and read financial results, both tasks machines could do easily)

As a result, we will, planetwide, need to deal with this risk of structural unemployment. Yes, a lot of jobs will be created, but many more jobs will be curtailed because that's the nature of automation. The US economy, for example, used to be mostly agriculture, and today less than 1% of the population works in agriculture. What the new jobs look like, we don't know, but they won't look anything like the old jobs—and there will be a long, painful period of transition as we get to that.

Imminent AI Risk: Substantially Worsened Income Inequality

Here's why this risk is imminent—and it's pretty straightforward. When you have a company staffed with human workers, you have to take money from your revenues and pay wages with it. Those human workers then go out into the broader economy and spend it on things like housing, food, entertainment, etc.

When you have a company staffed more and more with machines and a few human workers to attend to those machines, your company still earns revenues, but less of it gets disbursed as wages. More of it goes to your bottom line, which is part of the reason why every executive is scrambling to understand AI; the promise of dramatically increased profit margins is too good to pass up. But those profit margins come at a cost: fewer people earning wages.

What happens then is a hyper-concentration of wealth. Company owners keep more money—which is great if you're an owner or a shareholder, and not great if you are unemployed. That sets up an environment where hyper-concentrated wealth exists; and, for most of human history, that tends to end in bloodshed. People who are hungry and poor eventually blame those in power for their woes, and the results aren't pretty.

An Antidote to Those AI Risks

The antidote to these two problems is universal basic income funded with what many call a robot tax—essentially, an additional set of corporate taxes.

Where that potential solution will play out will depend very much on individual nations and their cultures.

Societies that tend to be collectivist, such as Korea, Japan, China, and other East Asian nations, will probably get there quickly, as will democratic socialist economies, such as the Scandinavian nations.

Cultures that are hyper-individualistic, such as the USA, may never get there, especially with corporations' lobbying strength to keep business taxes low.

3. AI models are evolving super quickly

The third thing we've learned in this last year is how absurdly fast the AI space moves.

Back in March of 2022, there were only a handful of large language models—GPT 3.5 from OpenAI, Google's BERT and T5, XLNet, and a few others. Fast-forward a year and a half, and we now have tens of thousands of language models.