Why we may be headed for a generative AI winter
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
This week, I’m taking a more skeptical tone and asking: Why hasn’t the generative AI revolution arrived yet?Also, a look at the AI email landscape, and some analysis on Perplexity’s latest funding round.
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The generative AI winter, part two
The threat of a new “AI winter” may dominate the AI conversation in the latter half of 2024.?
AI companies and their investors have been telling us for more than a year now that generative AI will create untold amounts of wealth by increasing worker productivity. There’s no doubt that generative AI is already increasing productivity in some areas, such as graphic design and legal research work. But there’s little evidence that the technology is broadly unleashing enough new productivity to push up company earnings or lift stock prices.?
Many large companies dove into building and piloting generative AI infrastructure and apps last year. Many of them found the undertaking complex and time-consuming, and many are still struggling to find the productivity returns on their investments. “You see very few people out there today saying, ‘Yes, we use this everyday, and it’s absolutely essential to what we do,’” said AI expert and ex-NYU professor Gary Marcus during a recent interview with The Agenda.??
Have the companies leading the AI boom overhyped the technology? OpenAI’s Sam Altman, the face of the AI boom, said earlier this year that AI models that can do most revenue-generating tasks better than humans will arrive in the “reasonably close-ish” future. He suggested, in front of Congress, that AI systems will become so powerful as to threaten humanity itself, and that regulators might consider requiring AI companies to get a license from the government to develop very large models. But artificial general intelligence—that is, a point where AI systems can learn to accomplish any intellectual task that human beings can perform—still seems far away right now.
Click here to read more about the possibility of a generative AI winter.
AI email apps remain limited—and expensive
I’ve long been on the lookout for generative AI apps that actually help me in my job as a journalist. I’ve not found many, partly because LLMs still hallucinate. One real pain point is the time I spend editing interview transcripts, for example, but I’ve had only limited success using consumer chatbots to ingest an interview transcript and turn it into a readable (and quotable) text.?
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I could also use some help parsing my email inbox. But my search for a consumer product that could scan my inbox and quickly offer up complex searches on its contents (for example, “find me three experts who can explain the TikTok ban”) has been mostly unsuccessful. I talked to a startup called Floode at a recent AI event; the founder said the tool can ingest an inbox full of data and do retrieval on it (and do a lot of other things like plan events and create to-do lists). But Floode is aimed at enterprise execs, and there’s a waiting list to try it.?
Click here to read more about why AI email has yet to deliver on its promise.
Perplexity becomes a Unicorn
The AI search company Perplexity, one of just a few consumer-facing AI startups having success and demonstrating real potential, just raised another $62.7 million in its fourth round of funding. The San Francisco-based company raised the funding at a $1.04 billion valuation, putting it in the Unicorn club, with a total funding of $165 million. The round itself was nothing special in terms of the dollar amount. It was the list of investors that’s notable here. Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and NEA doubled down in the new round, and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy invested for the first time.
?Click here to read more about Perplexity’s latest funding round.?
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Full-stack human-centered product designer | AI-savvy product design visionary | Infectious optimist and team player crafting inclusive, innovative products that empower & delight ?? | ex-Arm, Autodesk
5 个月While it's always wise to prepare for winter, and while this article makes an indisputable point that AI has not yet delivered on many of its bold claims and value props, I believe that AI's hyper-evolutionary nature demands that we think entirely differently about it. We shouldn't allow ourselves to comfortably compartmentalize AI along with other technologies, such as crypto, which slump into winter after they've reached the peak of the latest hype cycle. Unlike crypto or anything else that has experienced a winter freeze, AI keeps rocketing up its exponential curve. This fact should command our keen attention and inspire all of us who work in the field of technology to invest deeply in assuring that this evolution happens in a way that's as human-centered, human-friendly, and benevolent it can possibly be. [1 of 3 – continued...]