On the contrary, the first companies to acknowledge the new AI Winter will have a big competitive advantage over those still dumping money into the bottomless pit.
I've seen the "success" a non-software company has been having, trying to integrate AI into their processes. A hypothetical competitor who chose not to do so would absolutely be coming out ahead right now.
I can't say whether this trend would continue, but the answer to your question today is "yes".
Genuinely curious, what could an LLM even do for an ice cream shop? Checkout already takes less time than scooping a cone, and it's even quicker with cash. Maybe it could surveil the customers and employees? But I think that will lose you more customers than it gains.
Generally I would expect the ROI to be negative, like we've seen with most corporate AI projects, so yeah any ice cream shop that didn't invest in "AI" is going to come out ahead of one that poured money into the pit.
People still believing in AI being a temporary thing are the same ones refusing to get a mobile phone in the late 90s. Stating it wasn't needed and just a nice to have.
A big trend in AI spam is to take achievements in one field that could be called "AI" and use them as evidence of advancement in other fields that happen to be called "AI".
Tao has been doing a lot of demonstrations of using LLMs for search and translation by experts who already know enough about a field to judge whether generated text is valid or meaningful. Those are valid demonstrations, but they don't justify the LLM-as-intelligent-agent narrative being pushed by most of the reporting on the topic, so the whole situation reeks of payola.
A little bit of real content goes a long way toward getting people to pay for something unknown, which then turns out to be AI-generated. Even if they are not satisfied, that counts as AI content making a sale.
The last-modified-date effect is even more important, because it can be used to support whatever the latest fad is, without needing to adapt data or arguments to the specifics of that fad.
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