“The software it’s eating the world, ”said Silicon Valley guru Marc Andreessen ten years ago. And he was right. Amazon, which could still be considered as a company focused on e-commerce and the sale of books, was already, in essence, a company of software for its innovative way of breaking down physical barriers and selling its catalog digitally through Kindle.
Ten years later, the software It is no longer by itself the engine of innovation and social transformation that large technology companies seek with their products and services; it is artificial intelligence (AI). And we no longer speak of AI as something abstract, as something to be promoted and adopted by all companies and organizations without really knowing how, but rather as the fundamental axis on which they are already making significant and tangible progress in our day-to-day lives.
AI as the new iPhone roadmap
A clear example is the iPhone, the most important technological product in the consumer market. During its first decade of renovations, all advancements were made in software using the hardware as a means and with the aim of making it increasingly “transparent” for the consumer. As of the launch of the iPhone X (2017), a new roadmap for the next decade of the iPhone was established, as noted by Tim Cook: machine learning algorithms and its processor with hardware of dedicated neural network.
These AI algorithms began by making it possible for the iPhone to be unlocked by recognizing your face, being able to detect your attention at that precise moment and recognizing and learning from the physical changes it experienced over time. The software The iPhone began to be designed not only to do certain tasks, but to act as a rational being that can obtain and compare information through the senses (the camera), uses its memory and makes a decision: to unlock the iPhone or not.
The most amazing feature announced in the annual event Apple celebrated last Tuesday was the “cinematic mode” recording mode that replicates the frame focus effect that can be commonly seen in any series or movie. The iPhone 13 is capable of switching during recording between foreground and background focus, and is smart to do so when the subject of the action is looking away from the phone. Once the sequence is recorded, the user can change the focus afterwards to play with the focus transitions and the times in which the subject moves to the foreground or background.
The room for improvement in hardware It is already so narrow that it is increasingly difficult for phone manufacturers to encourage a terminal renewal: it is not enough to increase the speed of the processor, the resolution of the screen or the size of the battery, improvements of hardware so that functions of software that rely on machine learning algorithms. Apple, which controls its entire ecosystem, from the design of the processor to the operating system and applications, has a clear advantage during this next decade of innovation as it did in the first decade of the iPhone.
Google will use its own chip in the new Pixel terminals to achieve what is impossible with the chips currently available on the market. We will see it in October, but it is clear where the shots are going to go in the next few years. The rest of Android manufacturers will have to follow this path, but they will do it dragging and trying to follow in the wake of Apple and, perhaps, Google. Google, pioneers in software and AI algorithms, you need to control your own hardware to unleash its advancements and offer revolutionary solutions for everyday uses to its consumers.
The AI is eating the software
The paradigm has also changed if we look at it from a broader perspective. Advances are no longer contingent solely on the programs in itself, but in the use of computational power with an impact on the physical world such as the automotive sector, the development of more efficient renewable energy exploitation systems or health management. The software By itself it is no longer the tool on which to develop substantial advances for society. The software ate the world, but the AI is eating the software. And, unlike the advances we have seen over the past decade, those made in computational intelligence algorithms are closely linked to hardware chips and what we are going to expect AI to control for us like production cars or robots.
Tesla is not a car manufacturer, nor is it a software which also makes cars. Tesla is an artificial intelligence company that to offer something concrete has to manufacture cars and programs in a certain way. Like this one, all the big companies in the world are transforming themselves so that their products and services are controlled or enhanced by AI algorithms.
Amazon managed to transform through software your book-selling business. The AI is already devouring what until now was done by software, and this has just begun. Therefore, the most important thing in the future will not be the programmers, because programming a website or an application will soon be the task of AI services, but mathematicians who know how to direct, “feed” and develop machine learning algorithms, experts in ethics and treatment. of data, privacy experts and engineers who can come up with the hardware necessary for the requirements of the AI dedicated to the tasks that the human being cannot cover.