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clude the generative AI store, where you can “generate” things that didn’t previously exist (“Claude, please take all these individual expenses and cre- ate a single new monthly household budget spreadsheet.”). There is also the robotics-gadget store, the neural network store for facial recognition, and so on. Every outlet in the AI mall is offering some kind of simulated in- telligence product, but machine learn- ing makes up 80 to 90 percent of retail volume. Just as a normal mall needs a constant flow of foot traffic to survive, the AI mall must endlessly harvest data to double as both foot traffic and inventory. Wander down a spur aisle of the AI mall and you’ll also find the golf shop. It’s not the biggest, but we golfers do love gadgets and tech. The AI golf shop has products for swing analysis, mental-game assistance and on-course strategy. AI is also being used in club design, agronomy, tournament organ- isation and custom fitting. Some of the more accessible DIY applications in- clude golfers using it to plan efficient golf travel itineraries or settle bets with onerous maths. Mike Zisman, founder and CEO of Golf Genius, adds that “Even if to the public AI is relatively novel, it’s actu- ally been evolving for decades.” It’s also important to remember, he says, that amidst so much talk of Artificial Gen- eral Intelligence (AGI) one day taking over humanity, AI today is mostly one thing: our anchor tenant, machine learning. AI remains primarily a mar- riage between maths and mind-bog- gling amounts of computing power enabled by even more mind-boggling amounts of electricity. Hence, data centres so vast condensation from the water used to cool the machines generates indoor rain. We are deploy- ing computing power ceaselessly to hoover up, assess and compare data to predict and then provide answers to our questions. This simulates human intelligence. Will it help us become better golfers?
San Francisco from the airport, I passed a billboard that said, “Welcome to AI country. Population: Everyone.” That seemed to capture things well. The next day, I was at the magnificent Cal Club (California Golf Club), momentarily forgetting how AI had become an in- escapable part of daily life. I found myself in a bad spot on the 10th hole, facing 200 yards uphill from chewy rough, a shot that also required a fade around a troop of Monterey Cypress. My strategic process proceeded as per usual, which can be summed up as, close eyes and swing. But then I remembered, Wait, must consult the algorithms. In my mission to better understand golf’s convergence with artifi- cial intelligence, I was getting to try some products before they hit the market. The Arccos AI smart laser looks like any range finder except it pairs with your phone and a tracking device the size of an earbuds case you keep in your pocket. Together, these tools gathered and assessed available data points – distance, wind, gusts, slope, elevation, temperature, humidity, hole lo- cation, green shape, bunkering and somewhat unnervingly, my anticipated performance. The app on my phone advised a wedge-out of 90 yards to leave a third of 110 yards, showing precisely where it wanted me to aim on a map of the hole and with what club. This advice was intended to give me an outside chance at a par, probably make bogey. Me being me, I reached for a 4-iron. Ten minutes later, walking off the green with a triple, I re- flected on how AI’s future impact on golf might be bottomlessly complex, but how in another sense, it all comes down to one ba- sic question: Given that AI stands to influence practically every component of the game, is this good or bad? The term AI is a broad tent under which many different pro- cesses take place. A useful analogy is to think of AI as a shop- ping mall. The AI mall has a major anchor tenant, which in this case is machine learning, the brute-force computing tool that identifies patterns and relationships through data compari- son. Then there are smaller shops for specific products, such as large language models (LLMs), which are very much behind the public AI boom in that they have facilitated mass access to AI via the approximation of plain speech. Other shops in-
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