Bubble will burst, many AI companies will go under, the ones that remain will have to price themselves out of reach of most people. Lack of investor confidence will trigger a third AI winter, which will affect even actual valuable uses of machine learning models and the further development of locally-run models. People who graduated college between 2023 and 202X will have a harder time getting a job. AGI will still be a far-off dream.
Improvement stagnates.
Venture capital availability reduces.
Mag 7 try to monetise to continue development.
Business adoption is tepid as long term heavy use reduces skills and productivity.
Some financial VC fund learns from a credible whistle blower that generative AI is not a pathway to AGI. Revalues their portfolio, enters administration.
The ensuing fallout triggers a global depression.
LLMs are a dead end, and the massive amounts of money being wasted on them will make people too scared to invest in other forms of AI.
So we are currently at a local maxima that we won’t overcome in 10 years. It will take much longer before we try a different approach to create “AGI,” and the wasted money on LLMs will slow other forms of AI research, leaving us stagnating for >10 years
I’m not convinced that investors would know the difference between a company trying to improve llms vs taking a new approach. So I don’t think it will stifle investment in other forms of AI research.
I also don’t think they are a dead end overall. They sure aren’t likely to get to agi, but you don’t need agi to be useful.
You have to convince investors why your AI research won’t hit a wall like LLMs are now - they’ve poisoned the term “AI”
They’re a dead end, insofar as they do all they’ll ever be able to; if you can find use for them at their current level, great, but it does not look likely they will be able to do more than they currently can
- machine learning models will continue to improve their output somewhat but gains will be incremental and the intrinsic problems with ml-derived content (e.g hallucinations, context window limitations, long-term coherency) will remain
- open source models will catch up with commercial ones
- the smaller ml companies (like openai and anthropic) will be absorbed, probably by Microsoft and Amazon
- The increasing cost of hardware and energy will force companies to raise prices for ml subscriptions and eventually lock ml features behind paywalls
- Computer parts will remain expensive for a long time
- Programmers will collectively spend the next decade wrestling with the consequences of filling their codebases with millions of lines of ai generated code
- Google images will never fully recover
You forgot the most important part: it will be infected with ads. Asked about what the best dish soap is? Why it obviously is either Fairy or Dawn, depending on which brand paid more that week.
