Five signs that the GenAI honeymoon is over
And why that might be a good thing
I have long argued that Generative AI might be a dud; I just didn’t expect it to fade so fast.
Every news report below is from this week – and it’s only Wednesday.
First there was the Upwork survey I mentioned Monday:
Yesterday, Meta dropped a big GenAI project:
Another GenAI monetization scheme bites the dust.
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Later in the day yesterday, amid a background of prominent people like Musk and Kurzweil routinely making promises about AGI being imminent, Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer painted a picture of a much slower burn, alarming some investors:
To make this worse, today Business Insider reported a canceled deal:
and, wow, read the fine print, this one gets worse:
Middle-school presentations?
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And then there was this dispatch from the VC trenches at the Information, yesterday, by their reporter Kate Clark:
The bubble has begun to burst. Users have lost faith, clients have lost faith, VC’s have lost faith.
GenAI bubble, November, 2022 - July 2024, RIP.
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The good, maybe even great, news?
The fact that the GenAI bubble is apparently bursting sooner than expected may soon free up resources for other approaches, e.g., into neurosymbolic AI, as discussed here Sunday.
One step backwards could open up ten forwards.
Gary Marcus, author of the new book Taming Silicon Valley, has been warning that deep learning was oversold since November 2012. Looks like he was right.
"The fact that the GenAI bubble is apparently bursting sooner than expected may soon free up resources for other approaches."
I fear that these AI winters don't really work that way, and for good reason. From an investor's point of view, these "other approaches" must make their own believable promises to deliver huge paybacks. And, because they'll still be considered AI, they will be loathe to spend more money on them for quite a while. Also, the alternatives (eg, neurosymbolic AI) will most likely be considered long-term speculation, yet another thing investors don't want to hear.
"The fact that the GenAI bubble is apparently bursting sooner than expected may soon free up resources for other approaches, e.g., into neurosymbolic AI" - I truly hope so!