GenAI's Killer App
My good friends Bruno Aziza and Sanjeev Mohan (both as smart as they are sympa) recently recorded a videocast. You can see it on Bruno's excellent new substack, CarCast. You should subscribe: it’s entertaining and excllent.
But ... they discuss GenAI's killer app, and I think they get it wrong.
In the tech world, a killer app is the revolutionary application that drives the adoption of a new technology platform. It's the use case that makes a technology indispensable and leads to global adoption.
Wayback, machine
Back in 1993 (31 years ago!), the New York Times ran an article about the killer app for that strange new phenomenon, the Internet.
It's a great article. The web browser Mosaic was described as a new software program" that helped users navigate the Internet, which was "rich in information but can be baffling to navigate.
And the article gives some examples of what Mosaic can be used for: accessing NASA weather data, presidential speeches, digital music samples, and even a webcam of a coffee pot at Cambridge University. For the people interviewed, Mosaic was the first "killer app" of network computing -- an applications program so different and so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch.
In other words, the killer app for the internet was the web browser. Or, to put it more plainly, the killer app for the internet was ... the internet!
Before browsers, users navigated through command-line interfaces, using tools like FTP, Gopher, and Telnet to access and transfer information. I'm old enough to remember the shortcuts!
However, the appearance of browsers in the 1990s changed the Internet profoundly. Within months of the release of Mosaic, Internet traffic at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where Mosaic was developed, increased by a factor of 10. Over time, for the vast majority of users, the browser became synonymous with the Internet itself. When people spoke of going online, what they meant was opening their browser. This shift was so complete that today, many users might be hard-pressed to name an Internet application that doesn't run in a browser.
You know where this is going ...
So, where are we today? We're asking more or less the same question: what will be the killer app for generative AI? Will it be a groundbreaking chatbot? An image generator that puts professional-quality creativity in the hands of amateurs? Or perhaps an AI writing assistant that transforms how we create and consume content?
This answer is much simpler. The killer app for generative AI itself is … generative AI.
Just as the web browser became the universal interface to the Internet, generative AI is rapidly becoming a universal interface to a vast store of knowledge, analysis, creativity and interpretation.
The parallel goes further. Like the web browser, generative AI is characterized by its versatility and adaptability. It's not confined to a single use case but can be applied across various domains. Just as the increase in the browser led to more web content, which in turn drove more browsing, so the use of generative AI is self-reinforcing. More usage generates more use cases.
In a very short time, generative AI will be as ubiquitous as web browsers are today, becoming an invisible but indispensable part of how we live and work.
And that is the killer app.