What is AI?
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Really, what is it? Right now, most people think it’s an LLM. Which in turn is a compression of a whole bunch of knowledge recorded as documents, scraped off the web. Or a set of images or even sounds. It’s trained to respond to one text with another, and people think they are having a conversation with a machine.
This makes visualizing AI very hard. Where did that Sky voice come from, before OpenAI took it down? What’s in the training data? How is it avoiding some questions but answering others?
In February, I went to an event at SHACK15, a social space above the Ferry Building and the de facto world capital of LLMs. Their launches and hackathons are often handled by Cerebral Valley, the resident AI community builders.
The talk was by Dmitri Dolgov,a co-CEO of Waymo, moderated by Sebastian Thrun, who lead the original self-driving program at Google. Everyone in attendance got a Waymo code to try. I’ve already had one, and riding a Waymo was an unforgettable experience.
And when people started asking questions, how does the Waymo Driver work, I got it.
AI is Dmitri and Sebastian. AI is Yann LeCun and Jeff Dean. AI is Harrison Chase and Jerry Liu. AI is Sharon Zhu and Ines.
AI is the people who build it. Everything in a Waymo was made and touched by a human. Every message, every scenario is envisioned, created, and reviewed by humans. They care about you. They built machines to make your life easier. They are operating them, standing by their AI.
In a pouring rain, Waymo waited for me, drove me carefully, and made sure I’m safe before departing. I looked at it as it stood at the traffic light, waiting for it to change. Thank you, my AI friend. Thank you, Dmitri. Thank you, all software engineers, data scientists, sensor technicians, mapmakers, operators, who make it possible. The people of AI.
