After the massive hype around generative AI, seems likely there will be an AI winter when the promised transformation in many business areas just doesn't happen as advertised.
And then it did.
After the dotcom bubble exploded. Can't we call that a winter?
Was there a massive reduction in completely untenable .com's? But I'm not exactly sure if that's the definition of a winter, plenty of other internet based businesses did fine and kept growing in that time.
It's very likely we'll be disappointed with AI in many oversold contexts (I share the sentiment about self-driving cars), but it can't be denied that ChatGPT is a product that's being used _right now_ to massive success and still has quite a ways to go.
Large decisions such as SVB deposits are literally the last thing that will be given to AI, it's the most important part of the business. That doesn't mean AI is useless or is not being incorporated into valuable parts of businesses.
I'm at a large tech company, LLMs are already entering some of our key product workflows. It massively lowers the floor for a number of product features e.g. recommendation systems.
In a more general sense, many features that were previously too difficult to expose (e.g. simple coding commands) to business users are now on the table as long as we give them limited access to an LLM. The current hype train means that we don't even need to do much user education.
If crashing a self-driving car required me to spend 5 minutes rejiggering it, I'd probably use the feature a lot. With generative models there's usually very little cost to it making a mistake -- and even better, I can determine when the cost is likely to be high and modify my behavior.
Self-driving cars do seem much better than they used to be. But I have no interest in using them until they get better still. I don't have this same bar with LLMs or DALL-Es. And I think this will contribute to more continuous improvement in the technology.
But there will be a small transformation:
* More busy work will be automated taking away some of the fun and leaving the harder tasks thus making jobs shittier, pushing workers to find other kinds of work.
* More solutions on AI looking for problems will be implemented increasing the speed of success/failure, and from the lottery winner effect we can expect "the granny that created an AI solution and earned millions" that other devs will follow and fail leaving debts.
Since when is busy work fun and hard tasks shitty?