Grumbles about generative AI’s shortcomings are coalescing into a “trough of disillusionment” after a year and a half of hype about ChatGPT and other bots.
Why it matters: AI is still changing the world — but improving and integrating the technology is raising harder and more complex questions than first envisioned, and no chatbot has the magic answers.
Driving the news: The hurdles are everything from embarrassing errors, such as extra fingers or Black founding fathers in generated images, to significant concerns about intellectual property infringement, cost, environmental impact and other issues.
And it’s clear that you don’t know how cryptocurrency is actually being used, so it’s not a useful analogue to AI. Except to the point that you don’t know how AI is being used either.
The things that LLMs are being used for are already justifying their expense, otherwise they wouldn’t be used in the first place. There’s no “bubble” to pop on the usage side of things where jobs have been replaced by it, AI isn’tgoingto"go away." It’s possible that some of the big providers like OpenAI or Anthropic might go out of business or get bought out, that’s always a risk for first movers in a field like this, but if they fail it will be because others have stepped up to provide those services even more cheaply.
No, they aren’t. The things LLMs are being used for aren’t significant enough to justify the costs. OpenAI is the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley history and burns through almost a million bucks a day in data center operations alone. Its net income was -$540 million in 2022 and 2023 looks to be closer to losing a whole billion despite nonupling their income. They’ll need to double their revenue again without raising costs just to start breaking even.
That kind of money-bonfire never lasts long.
I literally addressed this in the comment you’re responding to. The individual service providers don’t matter, especially not first movers. This is an entire industry, it’s not just one company.
Precisely. It isn’t just one company blowing billions.
You only mentioned OpenAI. That’s one.
If that’s what you actually want, you can ask Google’s LLM to list them for you.