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It is because of this that I've been given a front row seat to a small slice of the AI world. Where I've started out skeptical, and sometimes even hoping for its demise, I've come to see the utility, and understand why the hype has been so wild.

I've been working with one client recently on fully understanding and making use of this new technology. I won't go into details here, but let's just say that this client has a lot of great ideas. The world would likely be a very different place if half of his ideas were fully implemented.

I've watched (and participated) as he and others have worked hard to make even one dream come true. The amount of money, focus, labour, planning, and patience needed to achieve his goal was astounding.

As a programmer, I got to benefit from this process. But it was slow and indirect. Yet it was all we had.

Not anymore.

Today I can watch him directly create what he dreams of. He is not a programmer, but has worked with programmers for years to achieve his goals. What before was a painstaking process of trying to communicate the vision, then waiting for the result, and then fixing it, has turned into hours and even minutes of work in between doing other mundane life tasks.

I find myself in a unique position that I did not expect. On one hand, a part of me is being passed by completely. The programmer side of me may not be needed much in the next decade. I may still program for my own amusement and projects, but who's going to pay me for hours for what can be automatically generated in seconds?

If that hand was the only one, it would be scary.

But the other hand is that new technology always brings with it a giant learning curve, and if you climb it, you will have skills worth paying for.

Regardless of which side of me is watching, I can say that it is a pleasure to finally see my friend begin to see some of his software vision come to life in a way that blows my mind. It has even softened my stance on AI.

Did software need to be this slow to create? Or has competition and bloat and layer upon layer of cruft slowed us all down, along with our overloaded CPUs and overcrowded RAM? Probably.

And the AI gravy train may not last forever. There are datacentre bills and energy bills and debts to pay, and get paid they must. What happens if/when your AI token bill is 10x what it was before?

The technical pitfalls and hallucinations remain as current challenges to overcome.

But watching a non-programmer create something so integrated with his business vision is a joy to behold. My job is to help avoid the pitfalls.

These folks obviously think different. But it occurs to me that there is one perspective that most people are not seeing.

Cloud AI companies are gaining real intelligence from you by trading artificial intelligence back in return.

The cloud computers take your ideas, your questions, your real life problems, feed them into models, and return partially baked code, probabilistic answers, and hallucinated lies in return. Sure, a lot of it is useful, but it is artificial, and occasionally harmful.

Oh, you don't think they are storing everything you type into those boxes forever and ever? I strongly suspect they are. This is the gold they are mining, and spending so much to obtain. All the world's private thoughts and desires and plans and hopes and dreams are flooding into their data centers at record pace. For later analysis.

Take the story of Josh which you can watch on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2fv664Ndf4. It's the story of a man who used AI to write a report he should have written, and then gets caught in court, where reportedly 350 pages of his entire ChatGPT history is read into the record.

Now, it doesn't explicitly say where this came from. Did they just open his personal account and copy everything out? Did they send a subpoena to the AI company for the details? Not sure. But anyone who knows how these things work would be shocked (shocked!) to learn that AI companies around the world are just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It is best to go into the agreement of using AI with your eyes wide open, and just assume that everything you type into the prompt is stored somewhere forever.

For example, ChatGPT's privacy policy states that they will retain your personal data until you delete it, in which case they will either delete it within 30 days, or de-identify and disassociate the data from you and use it to improve their models.

By that point, it doesn't matter if the prompt you use can be traced back to you. The gold is the prompt, the idea, the human intelligence or human experience behind it, which allows them to improve their mimicry of humanity and eliminate dependence on it.

Solution: run your own models locally so you own all your own data. How? I hope to blog more on this topic in the future as my friend and I have been recently working on Project Jarvis.