The Resonance Test 98: Gary Rivlin, Author of “AI Valley”

AI is not as new as we think, says Gary Rivlin, author of *AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence.*
As our non-artificial guest on *The Resonance Test,* Rivlin tells host Barry Briggs that back in the 1950s, it was thought that AI was always right around the corner. There would be a gathering of technologists who said: “Give us 10 years and we'll have this thing largely solved.” Which meant, says Rivlin: “AI was ‘a decade away’ for about 70 years.”
Rivlin notes that recommendation engines and Google Translate have been operating for a while. “Google Translate has been around since 2015. That's AI, but no one really thinks of it as AI.” However, when ChatGPT strutted onto the scene, it was something else. Rivlin says: “We were talking to it. Suddenly: AI that you could converse with. It's a whole different beast.”
The builders of that beast are his topic in *AI Valley.*
Rivlin, who was a reporter for *WIRED* in the dot-com days, returns to his old beat to document the onset of the recent, fast-blooming AI spring. He and Briggs, a former CTO at Microsoft IT, bring years of history into the conversation to offer an assessment at this moment of peak AI in Silicon Valley.
They talk, for instance, of Reid Hoffman. Briggs says, “He’s the exception to the rule of nice guys finish last.” Rivlin zings back, calling Hoffman: “A billionaire you can root for” and adding “this lonely kid who wanted friends created LinkedIn, which connects the world.”
Together they remember the dot-com days of irrational exuberance, getting-rich-by-selling-dog-food-online. “The problem was we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of a technology and underestimate the long term,” says Rivlin, adding we’re seeing a similar sort of thinking with AI today.
The pair reflect on how people used to joke about autocomplete. “I should have started thinking, ‘this could turn into sentences, this could turn into paragraphs, this could turn into dialogue,’” says Briggs.
Rivlin notes that agents aren’t “trustworthy” yet. He says that if an agent is going to “make material decisions, it really needs to be trustworthy.” In two, five, 10 years from now, “AI agents are going to be central to the work life of many, maybe perhaps most of us.”
We trust that you’ll be informed and entertained by this episode. Click on!
Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon