I don’t know about anyone else, but with every site I visit these days seeming to be eager that I try out their new AI, I’m deep in AI-fatigue. Ted Gioia says that unlike all expectations, demand for AI seems to be shinking rather than growing:
The AI hype is collapsing faster than the bouncy house after a kid’s birthday. Nothing has turned out the way it was supposed to.
For a start, take a look at Microsoft — which made the biggest bet on AI. They were convinced that AI would enable the company’s Bing search engine to surpass Google.
They spent $10 billion dollars to make this happen.
And now we have numbers to measure the results. Guess what? Bing’s market share hasn’t grown at all. Bing’s share of search It’s still stuck at a lousy 3%.
In fact, it has dropped slightly since the beginning of the year.
What’s wrong? Everybody was supposed to prefer AI over conventional search. And it turns out that nobody cares.
What makes this especially revealing is that Google search results are abysmal nowadays. They have filled them to the brim with garbage. If Google was ever vulnerable, it’s right now.
But AI hasn’t made a dent.
Of course, Google has tried to implement AI too. But the company’s Bard AI bot made embarrassing errors at its very first demo, and continues to do bizarre things—such as touting the benefits of genocide and slavery, or putting Hitler and Stalin on its list of greatest leaders.
So it’s no surprise that many people are now doing searches at Reddit or TikTok, instead of conventional search engines. This could have been Bing’s great opportunity, but instead its AI bot is turning into the next Clippy.
Consumers don’t want grotesque AI responses filled with errors and outrageous claims. Who could have guessed it?
The same decline is happening at ChatGPT’s website. Site traffic is now shrinking. This is always a bad sign — but especially if your technology is touted as the biggest breakthrough of the century.
If AI really delivered the goods, visitors to ChatGPT should be doubling every few weeks.
This is what a demand pattern for real innovation looks like.
How key innovations grew
(source)I used to study this stuff for a living — some people even called me the “King of the S-Curves” back then. (Hey, I’ve been called worse.)
As you can see, a real tech breakthrough grows at a ridiculously rapid pace in its early days. Look at how fast people adopted radio or the smartphone or electricity. And these required huge investments by consumers.
But they’re giving AI away for free at Bing — and it’s not growing at all.
This is not how consumers respond to transformative technology. The current demand pattern resembles, instead, what we would call a fad or craze.
And this is just one warning sign among many.
We don’t have AI. LLMs and the like are merely fancied-up Autofill. They predict the next words in the line, without any understanding of what those words are; there’s nothing there to understand WITH. (Forgive the linguistic issue; by “predict” I merely mean “calculate the probability”.) And since the information most of these LLMs were “trained” on (read: generated the statistics they used to predict the next words in the line) are copyrighted, many companies are losing much of the text they use to generate these models. If we must call predictive text generating “intelligence”, this is the equivalent of a lobotomy.
Secondly, what’s the use-case for LLMs? They can produce extremely low-quality content extremely rapidly. If you’re a tabloid website, fair enough, that’s your business model, but for literally anyone else it’s just not useful. It doesn’t even work to summarize information, since you can’t be certain the words on the page reflect anything in reality (LLMs produce spurious references, for example). The key innovations shown in the graph are useful to consumers–they either make tasks easier, or provide entertainment, or reduce time taken to do something, or the like. What do LLMs offer? Infinite text, something which anyone with an internet connection already has.
Comment by Dinwar — August 25, 2023 @ 09:02
Bruce Gudmundsson commented the other day that an attempt to use one of the current crop of AI tools to summarize some translations of an unusual German word into English and several other Indo-European languages looked as if the AI had just cheated and run a simple search rather than doing any actual linguistic analysis.
Comment by Nicholas — August 25, 2023 @ 11:51
Some of the art sites on GAB are littered with those creepy AI generated pin-up girl pics. I can just see every pimple faced slob sitting there “creating” the prompts for his fantasy chick in a frilly, yet sado-masochistic costume. The stuff falls so deeply into the “uncanny valley” that no light can escape it.
And it is. not. Art.
JWM
Comment by jwm — August 25, 2023 @ 10:28
I use Gab regularly, but I’ve managed to avoid the AI generated ‘art’ for the most part. As you say, I’m probably not missing much.
Comment by Nicholas — August 25, 2023 @ 11:52