Is AI Winter coming again?
I heard someone saying that most of the AI startups aren't getting funding. I know that the first AI winter started by not getting enough funding.
So what's your opinion?
So what's your opinion?
The second was because the benefits of "Expert Systems" were oversold, and didn't prove to be as beneficial as expected.
There will be a heavy correction in the market caps of companies that bet heavy on AI, as the promises don't live up to the hype. However, in this case, there clearly is benefit to using LLMs, the cost of training has proven to be prohibitive. Slower and more prudent approaches, with better hardware will allow progress to continue. If nothing else, it'll be a mild AI winter.
Legitimate curious question: what are the clear benefits exactly? I mean stuff that objectively improves society, not the plaything that ChatGPT has mostly become (there are exceptions to this as well, of course, I had a CFO telling me lately he used ChatGPT to find mistakes or bad contract clauses).
There are many things we can do now that were previously expensive or cost prohibitive.
This is about the same as the computerization of records. No longer to we have to pay people to keep rooms full of files in order to aid retrieval and long term record storage.
--- but I see you're asking about non-cost things
We can now read documents that are translated from other languages, lowering those barriers to learning about other cultures. It's now easier to interact with the information available to all via the internet.
It also makes some evil things easier, but that comes with every technology.
> This is about the same as the computerization of records. No longer to we have to pay people to keep rooms full of files in order to aid retrieval and long term record storage.
Eh, have you read the "Bullshit Jobs" book? It's a social and economic problem, rarely has been a technological one... TL;DR people want headcount, not efficiency. :/
Why don't you try it out yourself, eh? there are a lot of free options
Still, I am not entirely close-minded on "AI" but I don't think it's unfair to say that if it was that good then our area would have been hugely disrupted by now. And it does not seem like it is.
Personal experience? Not just me, but e.g. all the comments on HN on ChatGPT, Copilot, et al.?
I’ve been using it for about two years now to draft new code, after having programmed for two decades. It provides value to me in that some tasks that previously would take me a whole day now can be done in a couple of hours, maybe one hour of throwing ball with ChatGPT and then one hour of refactoring the code myself. I have plenty of colleagues who have similar experiences, especially when using it for tasks that can be “tricky to write but easy to verify” (e.g. visualizations).
Just keep in mind that (i) the paid version is miles ahead of the free version for coding, and (ii) using an AI assistant is like any other skill, it requires some training to learn what tasks they’re good at and how to talk to them.
The only thing cars did was to save time and resources doing things humans were already capable of doing. Now, such engines are used for life saving things like ambulances and food transport, but also nefarious things like invading other countries, or mundane things like dropping off your kids at karate class.
I suppose whether you think the combustion engine actually improved society depends on who you ask as well :)
This might be your point, but I think in most cases the disappointment will be entirely financial. Some, perhaps even most of the tools and products being developed are pretty cool, but in the majority of cases they're basically just AI wrappers or nice to haves.
It's like launching an email service or a website that tells you the current time in different countries in the late 90s or something. Email might be great, and your service might be really popular, but that doesn't mean there's any money to be made because anyone can implement POP3. Same with a website that tells you the current time in different countries – nifty tool, but not a real profit making business.
Corollary: 99% of AI startups are not providing real customer value and do not deserve to get funding on merit.
> do not deserve to get funding on merit
What is the criteria to decide here? If you know please. I want to drop everything and invest in them.
Image, video, music, speech aren't fully solved yet, and new models are still competing with giants like Imagen and Midjourney.
The startups that build on AI can still be heavily funded. Most likely you aren't going to see many AI startups like character.ai. They'll be things made possible with AI.
Uber wasn't an app company nor a cloud company, it's a company made possible by the two. Reddit and FB/Meta didn't need mobile apps, but it certainly increased engagement.
All of this AI/LLM stuff is exasperating. I don't think I can stomach to hear another MBA talk about "leveraging AI" in their next startup/product initiative.
Cool, better autocomplete in my IDE is handy. But that's about it. I'd trade that back in a heart beat if I didn't have to have awful chatbots shoved in my face every time I open a webpage.
Retirement has never felt so far away.
Hadn't realised there were that many FORTRAN programmers still around (in fairness, various languages have used 'subroutine' to describe various special cases of functions, or sometimes just all functions, but generally those languages have largely died out.)
So in a nutshell, it'll boil down to the next year or so.
Regarding people who say that GPT-4 increase productivity and whatnot. That's not the point, GPT-4/Claude3.5 do increase productivity and I use them daily and frequently. The question is whether that productivity increase will match the investments made. And investors have poured too much into AI.
If they are somehow useful in very novel ways maybe things look better.
Funding is lost due to unmet promises ● Lighthill Report 1973 shuts down funding in UK ● Dreyfus at MIT argues lots of human reasoning is not based on logic rules, involving instinct and unconscious reasoning ○ (No AI researcher will eat lunch with Dreyfus for the next decade) ● Sussman: “using precise language to describe essentially imprecise concepts doesn't make them any more precise.”
With that said, generative AI has proved to be very useful and we have absolutely no idea what the limits are, there' a lot to be built and in that manner, things will be good for quite a while. It might be that as the very first useful ideas introduce useful ideas, the companies that are currently lost will gain ideas and pivot their way to usefulness and profit. Or perhaps there will be enough useful companies to drown out the lost ones.
With that said, plenty startups will die and plenty will succeed. It doesn't matter, just figure out a way to contribute positively and be part of those that will survive.
Well.. not quite. The funding was government funding. The opponents got behind things like the lighthill report [1] and had the government funding cut.
IMNSHO this was the right thing to do. The claims were overblown and it was wasting national funds in research. But it was pretty political. People stopped talking to each other for decades. I was a 12 year old in this time, My dad was in the trenches in the opposition to AI funding camp so that's my bias. Nothing which has come since makes me re-consider this, I might say that modern-day private capital JV/VC funding has been a bit silly, but in the end it's private funds so it's their call.
[1] Lighthill, James (1973). "Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey" http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/inf/literature/reports/l...
Just the release of o1 hasn't been fully appreciated yet. And in the next few months and year ahead we are getting a deluge of new SOTA models that will completely change the assumptions of what AI can do.
A lot of the AI startups are just cash-grab wrappers with little understanding of fundamentals under the hood. Their failure isn't reflective of the massive gains in AI and track to AGI in the next few years.
I am a non-software engineer, I work for a small company that we could do whatever we want with language models in terms of the business. The issue though is all of our business problems are stacks of one off problems that the current models offer us basically no help on. Even if the models could help us we would basically have to rebuild the business from the ground up around the models to really benefit much.
Like the dotcom bubble, there is a large amount of time it will take for culture , business and society to leverage the technology. Between then and now I suspect sits an absolutely brutal AI winter that is brought on by nothing more than a good old recession.
Investors are looking for solid business models and actual problems solved, not just hype. The wheat's being separated from the chaff. Probably healthy for the ecosystem long-term.
I use AI daily and like it for a few use cases, but I’m not sure how it could bridge the gap from “useful boilerplate generator and rubber duck” to something as basic as “can actually find useful ways to clarify or optimize code in ways I can’t”. It’s not a big ask but it feels very far away despite recent progress.
It wasn't on the scale of dotcom