I know someone who made his future bride listen to “Into my Arms” before proposing. She said yes, but asked, “What was that awful song?” 

I encountered Cave once in a restaurant in London in Notting Hill (obvs) and asked him, since he doesn’t believe in an interventionist god, whether he believes in a non-interventionist god or an interventionist non-god? (Aficionados will get the reference) He looked at me … and walked off to pay his restaurant bill. 

Fund manager Piet Viljoen sent around a note to friends recently in which he said he subscribes to an irregular missive from Nick Cave called, “The Red Hand Files”. The latest one was a song lyric generated by ChatGPT after a fan asked the now well-known artificial intelligence bot to write a song in the style of Cave.

The bot certainly got the darkness. One of the verses goes …

“I’ve got the blood of angels, on my hands

I’ve got the fire of hell, in my eyes

I’m the king of the abyss, I’m the ruler of the dark

I’m the one that they fear, in the shadows they hark”

It’s dark to the extent of being funny. Anyway, the fan asked Cave what he thought of the song. Cave’s answer was surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, composite and interesting. Many people had been sending him songs, “most buzzing with a kind of algorithmic awe” and although he understood that the tech was in its infancy, he concluded: “This song sucks”.

“ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.

“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend,” he wrote. 

One of the highlights of Davos Day 2 was a discussion between the chair of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. There is a buzz about artificial intelligence (AI) at the forum, and indeed the world, at the moment and Nadella is at the centre of it, following the company’s $10-billion bid for buzzy AI bot ChatGPT. That $10-billion doesn’t even get Microsoft to majority ownership. 

At Davos, Nadella said AI is at the start of a new S-curve, which is tech language for loads of lolly. The base of the S-curve is all about a period of gathering steam, whereupon you hit a point of fabulous growth, after which it flattens out again as the tech constitutes a new baseline.

The moment, he said, feels to him like the previous revolutionary moment for platforms which was in 2007 when mobile and cloud platforms hit their S-curve moment. 

The tech might not be working for Cave, but it’s working like a bomb for software developers. Eye-catching demonstrations of the ability to answer queries and produce text in human-sounding language are one thing, but the key is the ability to use natural-language commands to generate complex computer code. 

Microsoft’s AI has been developed into a system called Codex, which prompts software developers with suggestions of which lines of code to write next, and that has been produced by GitHub, a Microsoft service for developers. And it, too, is working like a bomb.

Nadella said the interesting thing about the software industry is that for the first time, the number of software engineers hired outside of the software industry is now larger than the number hired within it. This is no doubt a good thing, he said, because education, agriculture, and healthcare, for example, all need these skills. 

What AI does is allow developers to use natural language prompts to do workflow automation. So if you have someone with domain expertise but not IT expertise, AI will help bridge the talent gap. 

But doesn’t AI constitute a kind of creepy, job-grabbing threat, Schwab asked (not in those words)? No, says Nadella; the software engineer is still the pilot of the project, but now the engineer will have access to a copilot with enormous leverage. And the applications are enormous, of course, particularly if combined with immersive tech like the metaverse. 

You can tell why the industry is so keen for AI to succeed; here is a new project that actually has a use case, unlike that smelly, discredited thing called crypto. Expect a huge festival of buzzwords. 

Or, as Nic Cave’s AI doppelganger might say: “It’s a siren’s song, that pulls me in,

Takes me to a place, where I can’t begin”.

Good investing, 

Tim Cohen