Peter Levine is best known as a general partner at the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. But he also dabbles as an astoundingly accurate futurist, known for predicting tech trends.
And he's now talking about the tech that he argues will make today's app-filled smartphone look as cryptic and quaint as an early-2000s model BlackBerry might appear today.
"All these little icons on the screen that you have to press to go do stuff?" he asked in an interview. "It's going be incredibly out of date."
Instead, he predicts we will use an up-and-coming tech known as generative artificial intelligence to tell our devices what we need — in our own words — and the AI will create it for us. This isn't technology like Apple's Siri or the Google Assistant, which lets you use natural language to search for and curate a list of already-existing information. This, instead, would be a series of AI agents that generate what you ask for when you ask for it.
The prototypes right now are image-generator apps that create original images based on natural language descriptions. Type in any bizarre thing you think of — "Velociraptors stalking through a corporate office, lomography" or "A still of Homer Simpson in 'The Blair Witch Project'" — and it creates an original, shockingly realistic image or artwork, as documented by the digital analyst Michael Howe-Ely.
AI image generators include Dall-E 2 from OpenAI, the for-profit arm of the AI research organization run by a who's-who of the tech world; Midjourney, another company stuffed with famed developers; Stable Diffusion from Stability AI, a startup that recently raised $101 million; and Imagen, the Google-developed text-to-image software.
These are not drawing apps that humans use, or a Siri-like search-engine result of images grabbed from the internet.
"It actually goes out and creates a brand-new image of that particular thing," Levin said. "And so, if you think about that as sort of the tip of the spear for applications, it's really interesting. I think that that's going to start to be very pervasive across a number of different disciplines."
Imagine a teacher asking a device to grade papers, or a recruiter asking for a special report of "top-producing sales reps in EMEA by all companies," he said. "You just basically instruct it."
The closest example we have is the "Star Trek" technology where crew members call out "computer" and then ask for whatever they want. Levine said the first steps toward that future had been taken and were moving toward "the end of applications."
