A few things about the state of AI 2024 that taken together paint a less-than-rosy picture:
(1) Ed Zitron makes a case — a pretty compelling one — that we may have reached peak (generative) AI. His focus is on generative AI riding a perpetual hype cycle that media and venture capitalists lap up willingly but that never leaves the hype stage. Not until the bottom falls out, that is. In Zitron’s piece, Sam Altman features pretty prominently as the chief hype master trying to leverage empty promises into ever greater positions of power.
I’m not sure how far I’m willing to follow Zitron’s line of argument just yet, but it does feel like he’s on to something. Relatedly, I also feel like generative AI is mostly useful in the “meh” range of tasks, in other words where the results don’t really matter. Generative AI currently belongs in the “low stakes only” category. Your average invite card, low-level LinkedIn post or email. So I could see a near future where the current flavor of gen AI loses its luster, and as always, it’s going to be interesting what might grow in that space instead. Given the investment levels we’ve seen over the last few years, that new empty space left behind should be quite large indeed.
(2) Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque left the company amid a year of more or less constant unrest in the company. Stability made Stable Diffusion, one of the first AI image generators, and has been a pretty big deal.
(3) ChatGPT can now be used without an account. (That’s for the older 3.5 version, not the current 4.0 model.) I can’t help but think this hints at a lack of user growth.
(4) Purely anecdotally, I’ve been playing around with Google’s Gemini (the business version) to see how it does. With it’s integration into Google’s core workspace services, which I use, this should have been a no brainer but it really didn’t click for me. At all. In my tests the results for useful requests were weak, and I found myself simply not using it — in this category of tech, users forgetting about a service is pretty much the toughest problem you can run into short of something like a data leak.
(5) Also from Ed Zitron’s piece, some speculation about legal battles around copyright and AI companies’ use of training data — a situation that looks sketchy at best, so I think he’s right. In Zitron’s own words: “Eventually, one of these companies will lose a copyright lawsuit, causing a brutal reckoning on model use across any industry that’s integrated AI. These models can’t really ‘forget,’ possibly necessitating a costly industry-wide retraining and licensing deals that will centralize power in the larger AI companies that can afford them. And in the event that Sora and other video models are actually trained on copyrighted material from YouTube and Instagram, there is simply no way to square that circle legally without effectively restarting training the model.”
(6) Whatever happened to Sam Altman’s $7 trillion bid to supercharge the whole supply chain for AI, right down to the chip factories? I’m guessing it’s tumbleweeds on that front.
So this all looks and feels like AI, especially the current crop of generative AI, has hit a bit of a rough patch.
What about the policy & regulation side of things? Well. The European AI Act has passed and is on its way of coming into effect, and the work now focuses on implementation and enforcement. Which brings me to the European AI Office, which is slated to be “the centre of AI expertise across the EU. It will play a key role in implementing the AI Act – especially for general-purpose AI – foster the development and use of trustworthy AI, and international cooperation.” It has the potential to really be a power player in this space, but that’s not automatic, only time will tell.
And to build out capacity to do all this work, the AI Office has a lot of hiring to do, with new talent presumably coming from outside EU institutions. Which at first glance seems like it’ll be a disaster. I looked at the hiring page. The explanations there still seem kinda readable. Vague, but it’s possible to get an idea. But once you click through to the actual job pages, you’re deep in the Brussels bubble and things become impenetrable really quickly. This is a field I’m really interested in and I know a lot of folks working on these issues, so I wanted to learn more — and emailed the email address provided there “for inquiries related to job opportunities”. The auto-responder (!) comes back with some generic boilerplate and links back to the website and a newsletter sign-up form. There’s also no roadmap for how they plan to further build out the team anywhere, so it’s not even clear what roles they’ll be trying to fill after the initial, I guess early career ones they’re currently advertising. (I say “I guess” because frankly I couldn’t tell for sure from the job descriptions.)
Like this, there’s no way they’ll get top talent. I know plenty of civic-minded people who might be willing to work for less than in industry, but there’s only a certain degree of brokenness anyone can put up with in a recruiting process, especially since this is usually a pretty good indicator of the organizational culture. If this is a Brussels insider organization they’re setting up, there’s not enough people with AI expertise; if they want outside AI expertise, I’m convinced they need to also create a culture where people from different backgrounds (civil society, industry, research, etc.) can join easily.
So yeah, I really hope they either find great people this way or change their ways, because the AI Office has an important role to play going forward. For now, it seems like AI regulation in Europe might be about to hit a rough patch right out of the gate, too.
