"Is the AI Revolution losing steam or is this just a media narrative?"
You know, subjectively, I find myself alternating between feeling excited and feeling bored with AI. New announcements come out, you see a demo like Sora, and it's mindblowing. And then 6 months later, announcement come out of similar technology or improvements, and I feel like, yawn. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe it's because of my experience using coding AI. I know programmers who say they're twice as productive. I've found AI tools to me mostly, but not entirely, useless. I'm willing to try anything, of course, because I need anything I can get to crank up my development speed.
It reminds me of when in 2016, Elon Musk, looking at the rapid rate of AI progress, predicted Full Self Driving by 2017. Then in 2017, he predicted it for 2018. Then in 2018, he predicted it for 2019. And so on. Today, Telsa Full Self Driving is rumored to be just reliable enough to lull people into complacency, which is actually kind of dangerous. Nobody is ready to rip the steering wheel out of their cars and declare they'd rather have the AI do all the driving because it's better than human drivers. But that's what "Full Self Driving" is supposed to mean.
There's an old saying in software development, "The first 90% of the project takes the first 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the time."
People look at AI's current ability to write code and predict real soon now it's going to be taking over all coding tasks for whole codebases and racing software development forward. But it seems like, just like Tesla Full Self Driving, we reached that 90% threshold really fast, and the remaining 10% is taking a long time. Today's generative AI models feel like that to me.
Yes, I know, OpenAI says they are seeing no sign they have reached the end of getting better models as they scale them up. Yes, AI image generators had problems a year ago, like not being able to draw fingers, that are pretty much completely solved now, so it's reasonable to expect with today's video generators, music generators, code generators, and "AI agents" to get progressively better with time.
Anyway, this YouTube video explores a number of media narratives that the AI revolution is losing steam, and concludes (spoiler!) actually, no, the AI revolution is not losing steam. AI companies are gobbling up chips as fast as they can (not caring at all about the exorbitant cost), businesses everywhere are getting familiar with the technology and learning where it makes sense to use it to add business value, adoption is actually faster than the internet or any previous technology, and innovation in the field is continuing, so, no, the AI revolution is not losing steam.
Is the AI Revolution Losing Steam? - The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News
