But then, I started to notice something, which is the vision that people who were just learning about GenAI were bringing into the space was very different from what me and my colleagues have been thinking about, the kind of world that we were trying to create.
is on the side to help you when you're stuck. now is replace of GenAI.
Stability raised a ton of money. Investors pivoted to caring almost exclusively about GenAI, and then everything else followed. And so my life has really changed.
survive and prosper it's our it's it's it's our secret sauce and if we allow our genan pooled through attrition or good intentions to deteriorate shame on
I remember waking up every single morning, not being sure if my life is real. I've literally devoted a decade of my life to studying GenAI, running one of the earliest startups where investors told me it doesn't make any sense, Generative AI is never going to be a thing, to suddenly living in a world where it was the most important thing.
So the sci-fi vision is that all-knowing oracle. Really, the instance that GenAI entered public consciousness, that instance, some companies started targeting it towards search, towards something that would just answer questions for you, which I found really surprising.
And Harold Cohen is showing his art. Harold Cohen is like a true pioneer in GenAI. He built a system called AARON in the '80s, in the '80s, to draw in his style.
That really blew my mind. I didn't know that that's the kind of thing you could accomplish with GenAI. So that was a big shock, and this was before I opened my company, which happened in late 2017.
growing even as it got better. And it's almost like the opposite from the one-hit wonder GenAI products that sometimes get released today, where you come in, throw in your photo, it gives you some cool version of yourself, I don't know, flying a dragon or something, and then you never come back again.
is on the side to help you when you're stuck. and time and effort into building tools that are just as powerful from GenAI perspective, but are kind of built to elevate,
is on the side to help you when you're stuck. That was the main use case before the whole world started caring about GenAI.
I've already done philosophy in the Islamic worlds. And I'm now doing Indian philosophy with a co-author named Jonardon Genari, next year with someone named Chike Jeffers, who works in Canada. I'll be starting to cover African philosophy, including the philosophical movements in the African Diaspora.
Shortly after that, I went to the Federal Communications Commission, began as head of the Consumer Bureau. And at that point our chairman, Julius Genachowski, was very interested in figuring out how we can give consumers help in a simple decision like choosing a cellphone plan.
And we were finding our people were really learning how to be more creative from using our tools. Next slide. So I was kind of living in this bubble with my colleagues and my co-founders, in our little GenAI world, and apply to creativity.
That was the order of events. It's not that, you know, some people think ChatGPT got released and then GenAI woke up. That was not actually the order of events.
is on the side to help you when you're stuck. We're so used to thinking of technology as efficiency, of more work faster, which GenAI is part of that, of course.