Understand that I believe in AI. But AI has been with us for decades - becoming a bigger part of our lives year after year. But Generative AI (Gen AI) - which just came on the scene last year when Microsoft touted it as means to threaten Google's stranglehold on the search market (so far Microsoft has failed with that attempt - getting just 1% additional market share) is another matter. To me (and many other observers) Gen AI is like the Metaverse or Blockchain - "all hat and no cattle" - as the saying goes. For example,
Wired magazine (not exactly a Luddite's favorite read) titled a recent story: "Get Ready for the Great AI Disappointment."
Wired: "More and more evidence will emerge that Generative AI an large language models provide false information and are prone to hallucination - where an AI simply makes stuff up, and gets it wrong." Anticipation that there will be exponential improvements in productivity across the economy, or the much vaunted first steps towards 'artificial general intelligence,' or AGI will fare no better." "Some people will start recognizing that it was always a pipe dream to reach anything resembling complex human cognition on the basis of predicting words." There are many similar stories out there questioning the usefulness of Gen AI.
Microsoft has placed its AI-powered assistant called Copilot that uses ChatGPT (a Gen AI version from OpenAI) in the upper right-hand corner of my computer screen. When it first came out, I tested it when I was researching topics. I found its answers underwhelming. I rarely use it anymore - just as I almost never utilized Microsoft's previous assistant "Clippy." My experience with ChatGPT is not unusual. Data traffic analytics firm Similarweb recently reported that ChatGPT web traffic has declined in five of the last eight months and is currently (January 2024 data0 11% lower than its peak in May 2023. The thrill is gone - just don't tell Wall Street.
~ Fred Hickey, The High-Tech Strategist, February 27, 2024
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