Is the AI Revolution Over?

Nate Buchanan Director, Pathfindr

For this week’s edition of The Path, I had intended to write about how to resolve issues with your custom AI solutions, such as hallucinations, latency, or high compute costs. When doing research on common problems that companies have had with AI in production, I came across this quote in a post from Gary Marcus:

"The Generative AI Bubble Will Collapse in 2025

Generative AI took the world by storm in November 2022, with the release of ChatGPT. 100 million people started using it, practically overnight. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, became a household name. And at least half a dozen companies raced OpenAI in effort to build a better system. OpenAI itself raced to outdo “GPT-4”, their flagship model, introduced in March of 2023 with a successor, presumably to be called GPT-5. Virtually every company raced to find ways of adopting ChatGPT (or similar technology, made by other companies) into their business.

There is just one thing: Generative AI, at least we know it know, doesn’t actually work that well, and maybe never will."

He goes on to articulate some reasons why he believes this: the much-heralded GPT-4 failed to live up to his expectations, hallucinations are still a thing, and examples of lasting corporate adoption are few and far between. Valid points all.

You might think that an AI startup co-founder would be discouraged after reading something like that - but I wasn’t surprised at all. In fact, it was refreshing to read this perspective when these types of concerns are often shared by our clients, some of whom have run into similar issues with their own AI experiments. It’s not at all an exaggeration to say that Gen AI doesn’t actually work that well - at least for certain use cases. But to say it “never will?” That seems like quite a stretch.

Here are a few reasons why I believe Gen AI is just getting started.

(1) It already does some things incredibly well.

Need to write a rough draft of an awkward email to a client? Want to summarize your action items from an entire week’s worth of meetings that you barely bothered to pay attention to? Trying to strategize on how to ask your boss for a raise? AI can do all of these things, and many more. Imagine how much time you’d need to spend on those tasks if you didn’t have access to ChatGPT.

(2) It’s only going to get better.

Overblown claims about AGI aside, it’s no secret that LLMs and the applications built on them have only been getting more and more powerful with each successive iteration. We’re now moving into the realm of real-time reasoning, with models that “think” about how to execute an instruction rather than purely relying on pre-training. Released as a preview two weeks ago, OpenAI’s o1 is one such example, capable of creating a video game from simple text instructions.

Imagine what AI will be able to do by this time next year? Or in five years? Or ten?

(3) Nobody said it would be easy

One of the most common misconceptions is that AI is - or should be - a magic wand that can solve a wide range of problems effortlessly. Anyone who’s built an AI application in the real world will tell you that this just isn’t true. These solutions need lots of experimentation, testing, and refinement before they’re ready for prime time, which is why we at Pathfindr emphasize getting working applications into a group of (friendly) users’ hands as soon as possible. It’s the only way you’ll get the feedback you need to make your idea better.

(4) It’s not fire-and-forget

Like anything complex, AI-powered applications tend to break down over time. It’s important for your team to understand that they need to have a plan to provide ongoing maintenance to correct for things like hallucinations or to tweak guardrails based on user feedback.

Generative AI is here to stay - it’s already changing the game for companies that know how to harness it, and as its capabilities evolve, it will only become easier to do exactly that. As long as you’re in it for the long haul, and are prepared to do the work to reap the benefits, you’ll be well-positioned for what’s ahead.