Artificial intelligence is getting very good, very fast. Whether it’s music, text, code or imagery, the time when it was reliably possible to tell the difference between AI and human outputs is disappearing at an alarming rate.
Yet for all their wizardry, AIs can also be quite useless. They make things up and misunderstand instructions. They are brilliant as toys but incompetent as assistants.
All this makes it hard to know how to put AI into perspective. Is it the most important technological trend since the iPhone? Or since the industrial revolution? At this distance, it’s hard to say.
There are industry measures to assess the intelligence of AI models, known as benchmarks. These too show rapid improvement.
When Google released Gemini 3, its latest AI upgrade, last week, it broke records across the board.
But benchmarks are too narrow to be totally reliable guides to ability and potential.
This, says Marc Warner, is why you need to zoom out and look at the overall trend. When you do, he says, you see “a very strong exponential”.
An exponential trend is where growth doubles and keeps on doubling. At first progress seems slow, but, before long, the line on the chart is rising almost vertically.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing, everything,” as Dr Warner puts it.
It’s a pattern familiar from the COVID pandemic, where it caught out politicians and public health officials around the world.
Now, says Dr Warner, who runs British tech company Faculty, it’s happening with AI – and he’s worried we don’t have a plan.
“We saw in COVID, if you don’t prepare for exponentials properly, they can really hurt you when things start to get very serious,” he says.
Could AI be as disruptive as COVID? It depends if its growth keeps…
