Smells a little bit like AI winter?
A lot is going wrong all at once. Not sure it is coincidence; my flight is about to take off but a quick note, on three major bits of AI news:
Tesla FSD recall, today
Google stock drop after Bard fiasco, last week
Microsoft must be having a code red over the Bing meltdowns, especially with the bizarre conversation between Bing and Kevin Roose at NYT. perhaps the product might get paused? Today
Could a simultaneous implosion lead to an AI winter?
Someone said to me on Twitter, these are three separate issues. No, they are not:
No. Tesla recall, MSFT Bing fail, and Google Bard fail are NOT independent; each reflect the fact that you cannot build AI in the real world from Big Data and deep learning alone.
Too many edge cases and not enough reasoning. We need new approaches; current AI has been oversold.
Tobias Goebel 👀 @tpgoebel
Will be interesting to see what happens next.
Reminds me of the story in P.T. Barnum's autobiography of launching a "lottery" to get rid of a bunch of old bottles and blackened tinware. The intrigue served as a distraction. "The tickets went like wildfire," he wrote. "Customers did not stop to consider the nature of the prizes." Bing's "P.T. Barnum" play took advantage of the huge hype wave on ChatGPT, then Google allowed themselves to feel pressured into playing the game, too.
It is unavoidable this will crash, I think. When that happens (as it has happened before), the world will switch — again — from optimism to pessimism. These are both shallow (so typically human) reactions. What we need, though, is realism. Which is not particularly easy to establish, given how human minds work.