I wonder what’s wrong with us as a species. We love to run into one direction all together chasing the next big thing just until the next big trend comes along.
Quantum AI crypto LLMs for the win!
We ask for faster horses, when automobiles would get us where we want to go. It is a lack of imagination for what is possible in the future that keeps us risk-averse and focused instead on a quest for incremental improvements to the status quo.
This was the focus of the idealistic vision of the whole "disruption" meta-meme as it spread through Silicon Valley.
Not to say that maintenance and refinement aren't important, but innovation doesn't look like just adding more parameters and ways to scale massive computations.
The main concept that AI laypeople (even those who burn OpenAI credits on a hobbyist basis) are missing to really grasp the possibilities of these kinds of statistical analysis techniques is a deep understanding of the notion of inductive bias. For instance, Transformers are so powerful precisely because they have generalized that idea of inductive bias one level up by using multi-head attention to project onto many different linear spaces and attend to them differently in different contexts, rather than just filtering through effectively one linear perspective at a time as with your traditional dense NNs.
The kinds of innovations we have witnessed most recently are actually pretty small steps in the space of possible architectures, not to mention training methods, etc. For instance, predictive coding approximates gradient descent[1] which opens up all sorts of new architectures (feedback arch, modular/federated/local compositions, etc.) that are intractable with traditional backprop-based techniques unless you can manage the infrastructure around periodic global parameter/state syncs.
By and large, I believe, people are conservative and would prefer for things to stay as they were, unless the change solves a specific problem.
Sometimes people actively tried to resist "progress" and had to be forced into their luck by those in power. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#Government_response
In general your most staunch conservative doesn't mind things changing if it personally benefits them greatly (especially if they don't bear most the burden of its effects).
Your most avid progressive commonly want the things that bring them comfort to stay the same, even if its potentially harmful to someone else.
I believe the issue here is we're playing "everything everywhere all at once". Everywhere on the globe is pretty much instantly connected to everything else via digital communications. There is no more sit by the sidelines zone that gets to avoid this connectivity. You may not want it, but you have to stop everyone else from bringing that connectivity too, and somehow maintain casual connectivity economically unless you want to play caveman.
> OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January
That's 1.3% of the estimated population of our species. It's only 1/3 of US population.
Like vaccines - inactivated viruses isn't a different "wave" than mRNA, they are logical successors within the same intellectual pursuit.
Or Vulkan vs. OpenGL. They aren't separate "fads" that gained traction.
Or ARM vs. x86. They aren't "fads" so much as entirely reasonable evolutions of technologies based on the evolving knowledge of the field and its needs.
Not everything is a popularity contest.