We don't know what generative AI will be (or what will happen next week), but we're starting to work out what questions to ask

Buzzfeed News dies just as Reddit and Stack Overflow say they'll charge LLMs to train on their data. Who owns content and how does distribution work in an LLM age? Are those the right questions? What should we be asking? 

Crypto crashed, metaverse was silly, and now we know that generative AI is the future of everything. Right? Well, sort of. But though the hype has moved on, the reasons web3 and VR were interesting haven't really changed. 

If you spend an hour typing prompts into MidJourney, who owns the result? There are easy answers to this, but they're probably wrong - these are new questions with new puzzles, much like radio, photography or music before. 

Generative machine learning is moving so fast it's impossible to keep up. What questions can we ask about GPT4, before everything changes again next week?

The 'ban it' snowball is getting bigger and bigger, but what problem are we solving - privacy, or propaganda? How does this scale to all the other Chinese apps? And meanwhile, how well do we pay attention to the product itself? 

Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google?

Blog post and charts 

Microsoft thinks (or says) that Generative ML will reset the search market, unlocking Google's market share and collapsing those 60% operating margins. Really? What would that mean?

What would generative search mean? Generative video? Indeed, Generative products? Last week we talked about how ChatGPT, LLMs and generative ML work - now, what might they mean. 

The wave of enthusiasm around ChatGPT and generative AI feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. But - it makes things up, and it doesn't actually understand anything it's doing. Probably. What does that mean? What's this for?