The greatest crowdsourcing story ever sold

Taxed on both ends

Sometimes it feels like A.I. has been dumped in our collective laps with a “you figure out what to do with it” mentality. The premise, from the A.I. companies, seems to be that they have created an impressive and incredibly powerful albeit potentially dangerous technology, but they’re not quite sure what its good for, how to make it safe or profitable.

That’s where we come in, citizens of the world. They’ll give us free or cheap access to A.I. tools, embed them everywhere and see what we come up with. These things are so powerful and so impressive, they just have to be equally useful, and ultimately valuable. They must be. If you don’t think so, you must be using it wrong. It’s too important not to try. There’s only two left, going fast, buy now.

I guess in some sense that’s not unlike the internet, which is not a product in of itself, but a platform upon which lots of innovation and profit was made. Maybe that’s the case here too?

In this case the profits will be built not only on the effort that went into creating the content they are trained on, but also on the work that will go into figuring out how make them useful.