AI Could Empower Any Business

材料由Allen和Hugh提供。致谢！

When I think about the rise of AI, I'm reminded by the rise of literacy a few hundred years ago. Many people in society thought that maybe not everyone needed to be able to read and write. Back then, many people were attending fuse or herding sheep, so maybe there was less need for written communication. And all that was needed was for the high priests and priestesses and monks to be able to read holy book. And the rest of us could just go to the temple or church or the holy building and sit and listen to the high priests and priestesses read to us.

Fortunately, we've since figured out that we can build a much richer society if lots of people can read and write. Today, AI is in the hands of the high priest and priestesses. These are the highly skill AI engineers, many of whom work on the big tech companies. And most people have access only to the AI that they built for them. I think that we can build a much racial society if we can enable everyone to help to write the future.

But why is AI largely concentrated in the big tech companies? Because many of these AI projects have been expensive to build. They may require dozens of highly skilled engineers and it may cost millions or 10s of millions of dollars to build an AI system. And the large tech companies, particularly the ones with hundreds of millions or even billions of users, have been better than anyone else at making these investments pay off because for them, a one size fits all AI system, such as one that improves web search or that recommends better products for online shopping can be applied to this very large number of users to generate a massive amount of revenue.

But this recipe for AI does not work once you go outside the tech and internet sectors to other places where, for the most part, there are hardly any projects to apply to 100 million people or that generates comparable economics.

Let me illustrate an example. Many weekends I drive a few minutes from my house to a local pizza store to buy a slice of Hawaiian pizza from the gentleman that owns his pizza store. And his pizza's great, but he always has a lot of coat pizzas sitting around. And every weekend, some different flavor of pizza is Alastair. But when I watch him operate his store, I get excited because by selling pizza, he is generating data. And this is data that he can take advantage of if he had access to AI. AI systems are good at spotting patterns when given access to the right data. And perhaps an AI system could spot if Mediterranean pizzas served really well on a Friday night. Maybe I suggested him to make more of it on a Friday afternoon. Now, you might say to me, hey, Andrew, this is a small pizza stall. What's the big deal? And I say to the gentleman that owns this pizza store, something that could help him improve his revenues by a few thousand dollars a year. That will be a huge deal to him.

I know that there is a lot of hype about AI's need for massive data sets, and having more data does help. But contrary to the hype, AI can often work just fine, even on modest amounts of data, such as the data generated by a single pizza store. So the real problem is not that there isn't enough data from the pizza store. The real problem is that the small pizza store could never serve enough customers to justify the cost of hiring an AI team. I know that in the United States there are about half a million independent restaurants and collectively, these restaurants do serve 10s of millions of customers. But every restaurant is different with a different menu, different customers, different ways of recording sales that no one size fits all. AI will work for all of them.

What would it be like if we could enable small businesses and especially local businesses to use AI? Let's take a look at what it might look like at a company that makes and sells t shirts. I would love if an accountant working for the T-shirt company can use AI for demand forecasting, say figure out what funny means, the print on t shirts. That would drive sales by looking at what's trending on social media. Or for product placements. Why can't a frontal store manager take pictures of what the store looks like and shirton AI and have an AI recommend where to place products to improve sales? Supply chain, can an AI recommend to a buyer whether or not they should pay $20 per yard for a piece of fabric now? Or if they should keep looking because they might be to find it cheaper elsewhere? Or quality control. A quality inspector should be able to use AI to automatically scan pictures of the fabric being used to make t shirts, to check if there are any tears or discolorations in the cloth.

I hope that the pizzeria owner and many other small business owners like him will also take advantage of this technology, because AI is creating tremendous wealth and will continue to create tremendous wealth. And it's only by democratizing access to AI that can ensure that this wealth is spread far and wide across society.

Hundreds of years ago, I think hardly anyone understood the impact that widespread literacy will have. Today, I think hardly anyone understands the impact that democratizing access to AI will have. Building AI systems has been out of reach for most people, but that does not have to be the case in the coming era, for AI will empower everyone to build AI systems for themselves. And I think that will be an incredibly exciting future. Thank you very much.