Cloud also known as Cloud Computing and somewhat synonymous with the original innovators in this space, AWS, was a huge platform shift and multi-decade story that has been and will continue to play out for many years to come. Effectively we moved from single purpose fixed compute, storage and networking to on-demand multi-tenant platforms and services that could be spun up by simply calling an API endpoint. The change and realisation of how we could harness this power has created a massive boon for AWS and others. Not only that, it’s fundamentally transformed how we write software and deliver products today. No longer do we wait 6-8 weeks for access to servers, it’s instant. No longer do we need to liase with our infrastructure team, we can go test that new service or autoscale immediately or as required. Cloud has transformed software delivery for the better.
So what’s bigger than Cloud? How could we top our Desktop > Web > Mobile > Cloud experience. Well now we’ve got Artifical Intelligence aka AI.
But what is AI? Defining the term Cloud took a long time. It was a very wishy washy thing. In the end it became a reference point for everything that happend on a server somewhere far far away that you didn’t manage and didn’t necessarily have access to directly. So what does that have to do with AI? Well AI became a catch all placeholder for anything remotely intelligent or that used machine learning. Today we’re cargo culting it for what’s effectively generative AI or more specifically large language models (LLMs) which have the ability to generate text, video, audio, images, etc.
Nevertheless AI is here to stay as a term for anything intelligent starting with the LLMs and showcasing to us very quickly how all of our software interaction is going to change in the coming decades. You see if you just turn back the clock and think about life pre-internet and then how with every decade that changed the face of society, you’ll come to see that with every year we interact with AI it will fundamentally transform software usage. AI has the ability to bridge the gap between man and machine and create a fabric that will effectively weave itself into everything in our reality.
What does that mean for us? Well firstly it’s quite scary considering how dependent and addicted we already are to technology. Yet it also means massive advances in tools and systems that we’ve come to rely on for healthcare, transporation, agricultural, etc. We are going to fundamentally benefit from AI in a way that’s lightyears ahead of what we experienced with the internet and effectively the major power user of that, the Cloud. AI could eclipse internet bandwidth usage of the Cloud tenfold in the next 10 years. And what that really says to us is, AI is the next platform. It’s the system through which all our interactions with technology will occur. It’s a system through which we’re going to either define ourselves or break free from.