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AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind?
We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar. And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like transcribing audio and video; describing images; summarizing documents; and automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing – such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos. These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of.
If there had never been an AI bubble, if all this stuff arose merely because computer scientists and product managers noodled around for a few years coming up with cool new apps, most people would have been pleasantly surprised with these interesting new things their computers could do. We would call them “plugins”.
It’s the bubble that sucks, not these applications. The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things. It wants expensive, “disruptive” things: big foundation models that lose billions of dollars every year.
