[Edited for clarity and conciseness]

Intro

Hey there, everyone! It's been a minute, but it's Lola, founder of Lunch Pail Labs and your host for Lunch Pail Daily - my personal audio diary on running a digital product studio in Atlanta, Georgia. I've taken some time to reflect on last year's events and refine what we do here at Lunch Pail Labs, and now I'm excited to dive into season three with all of you. Today, in our first episode of the season, I'll give you a quick update on what we've been up to and share my personal experience with AI anxiety - a feeling I know many entrepreneurs and software developers can relate to. Let's get started!

What’s New?

Let's talk about what's been happening at Lunch Pail Labs lately. As some of you may know, we've been going through a bit of a transition. While we started out as a no-code focused studio, we've recently become more interested in integrations. To reflect this change, I've updated my website, LinkedIn headers, and other materials to better emphasize our new focus. This has been the main area of focus for me over the past few months. Despite this transition, I've been fortunate enough to receive some exciting opportunities, including speaking gigs and licensing content around API education.

AI Anxiety

I've been feeling pretty anxious lately about the pace of advancements in AI, culminating most recently in OpenAI's new chat GPT plugins. It feels like these new developments could render the work that I've been focusing on essentially meaningless. And I'm not the only one who's feeling this way - I know that many software developers and entrepreneurs are grappling with the same sense of anxiety. One of the reasons that chat GPT plugins are such a game-changer is that they build off of recent research demonstrating that language modules can teach themselves to use tools. When I first read about this, I was struck with a sense of excitement and also an awareness that this development would take some time. But now it seems like it's here, and more broadly speaking, the question becomes: what does the future hold for my niche of pre-built integrations?

As someone who runs a digital product studio, I find myself wondering whether it will even be worthwhile to focus on building software in a world where end-to-end AI systems can accomplish so much on their own. Will we see a day when there are very few humans involved in the process of building software? I also worry about the implications of training AI models on public data - what does that mean for building in public or sharing code snippets? Will we see a return to a more secretive, stealth-based approach to development? And what about the potential for a corporate oligopoly on steroids - with whoever has the best LLMs winning out and smaller businesses unable to compete? There are a lot of questions, a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of doom and gloom out there right now.

Techno Optimism

In the midst of my anxiety, I came across a few pieces that put things into perspective for me. One article that particularly stood out was about generative AI and autocomplete, written by Noah and Rune. Rune actually works at OpenAI, the company behind chat GPT and chat GPT plugins. In the article, the authors discuss the concept of comparative advantages and resource limits. For example, someone like venture capitalist Mark Andreessen probably doesn't have time to write his own emails, so he has a secretary do it for him. Similarly, AI is resource-limited, and using advanced applications often comes at a cost of GPU resources. With this in mind, it's likely that modular composability will continue to be an important trend in AI development.

Another interesting finding came from a research paper by AI safety and research company Anthropic. The authors found that humans using AI outperformed both humans-only and AI-only systems. This suggests that we're still in an AI-assisted age, rather than an AI-replaced age, at least for the medium term.

Finally, I came across a tweet from Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad. He posited that AI gives everyone a promotion: designers become CEOs, CEOs become VCs, and VCs become LPs. This suggests that AI technology has the potential to democratize our understanding of the world and open up new opportunities for growth and development.

Combined, these pieces gave me a more optimistic perspective on the future of AI and my place in the industry. While there are still many unknowns, I believe that AI will complement our work and help us achieve a more efficient and productive future.

To the Future

There are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of AI and its potential impact on software development. Lower execution costs could enable more people to act as VCs and launch multiple projects within a particular niche. No code could become a reality, allowing anyone to easily create software and monetize it. There's also a lot of exciting work being done with open-source frameworks like Lang chain, which can be used to build large language models and chat GPT-like applications. This means that developers will still have many tools available to them

These advancements in AI technology also have implications for creative content like podcasts. It’s part of the reason why i’m bringing Lunch Pail Daily back! With tools like Whisper and chat GPT, it's easier to repurpose content and share it on different platforms. This can help creators  better leverage their content and reach new audiences.

Overall, it's clear that AI will continue to play an important role in the future of software development and creativity. While there are still some uncertainties and unknowns, the innovations we've seen so far suggest that there will be many exciting opportunities to come.

What are your thoughts on recent AI advancements? Hit me up on twitter, twitter.com/ojabowalola I’d love to hear your thoughts!