We are in the middle of an almost unprecedented tech-bubble for AI and now it looks like the bubble is nearing it end. The reason I say that is now instead of companies trying to sell us AI as the cure all for everything we have reports coming out with stories that are strikingly different in tone from the ones a few days ago.
For example, Sam Altman is now telling people that the “investors are overexcited about AI models. ‘Someone’ will lose a “phenomenal amount of money.”. The head of Amazon Web Services Matt Garman is now telling folks that “Laying off engineers for AI is the dumbest thing companies are doing”. Then we have the report from MIT that states that 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing.
There are multiple such stories that are now coming out now and it feels like a push towards gaslighting the world about how the same people were not the ones who pushed AI as a cure all and replacement for the humans in pretty much every industry and aspects of our lives. AI systems were nowhere close to what the hucksters were claiming to be possible and in a lot of cases we found out that the demo’s were faked with developers in the background doing the actual work.
The impact of this burst is going to be brutal especially in the Tech Company side as they moved away from their core competencies and crammed ‘AI’ into their products regardless of whether folks wanted it or not. That being said, not all is bad because once the hype machine dies, people who have been actually working on interesting AI or Machine learning models will emerge from the shadows of the hype and we should see some good progress down the line. This is similar to what happened during the DotCom collapse (I caught the tail end of that during college) where the companies that were built on hype & lies collapsed but the infra created from them was absorbed by others who had actual useful products.
Lets see how things go from here… At the very least we should soon start seeing more and more people getting hired to fix the code created by the vibe-coders.
– Suramya