AI hype cycle, highlighting the unrealistic expectations, media frenzy, and the cautious approach of enterprises towards AI.
AI Bubble – Loving It – Replicate it – NO!
Artificial Intelligence Coined – 1956
The first hint of AI appeared in a Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s science fiction play in 1921 called “Rossum’s Universal Robots” which introduced the idea of “artificial people” which he named robots. In 1956 John McCarthy at Dartmouth College created a workshop named “Artificial Intelligence” with the attendees becoming the leaders in AI research. Many of them predicted that machines as intelligent as humans would exist within a generation.
2010 – 2020 – The AI boom
The AI boom, which is an ongoing period of rapid progress in AI, started in the late 2010s before gaining international prominence in the 2020s. This period saw significant advancements in AI technologies, such as large language models and generative AI applications, which captured widespread media attention. The launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022 was a pivotal moment, signaling the democratization of AI for the masses and contributing to the current AI hype cycle.
Media click bait
What a wonderful moment for the struggling media companies. A new topic to report on as the news about the UK withdrawal from the European union was everybody’s news and redacted down to its very inch. A new click bait. “Publish something on AI and make sure it’s on the front page” was the call from every news publisher. Those with the most bent predictions earned the most clicks, conversions and sales paving a new way to prey on the uniformed and insecure. “We will lose our jobs.” “We will enter into Cyber wars fought by AI robots”. “We will lose control and humanity will be wiped out.” – NONESENSE we shouted!
AI Startups
Drum roll – enter the young generation of AI startups. “We have the edge.” “We have the tech.” “We know how to code”. “Give us your money and we will make you super wealthy.” “Lets’ cloak our tech with AI and people will think we are the future.” – NONSENSE we said and it’s still reverberating.
Come to our website and type in the name of your application and watch this magic happen – boom here’s your app. Then prompt 20 more times just to change the background color – WHAT? “What app?” You may ask. Well anything, it’s all been done before. A task list. A reminder app. A travel app. A recipe. A CRM. Well how many more of the same apps do we need and who are the users and how much will it cost? Simple. Publish it on social media and what do you get, tons of social people creating gimmick apps and feeling proud about becoming a tech expert or do we call them Tick Tok or YouTube heroes. I read an article about AI and now I’m an expert even though I never even studied machine learning. I got someone’s tool and I’m making amazing stuff. Try this and you will make 100’s of 1000’s in no time. Well I have news for them. Read on.
What about enterprises?
I have 1000 -10’000 employees. “Am I going to let them create their own apps from some hype on social media and let them use it for work? NO SIR!” But why not? “Well imagine if just 10% of my staff think they are new born developers and start entering my company and my customer information into someone else’s AI databases and then stream it across the World. As a CIO/CTO that just makes my plan for the company flop because what I’m trying to do is remove all the existing microservices and 3rd party apps some teams just have to have because we haven’t built our own yet, well it’s in the fat pipeline. My plan is application modernisation for the existing mission critical apps we use and bring all that data back under my control and reduce our attack surfaces.” Yes, I have been hearing that from many of them. “No, back off and use what we have even if it doesn’t do everything you want and if you push hard enough I’ll start ignoring you. If it works I wont break it in fear of losing my job or the company getting held ransom after someone on the dark web has sapped our data out and is demanding crypto to give it back. My worst nightmare. And don’t even ask me if you can use AI to create your code. If everybody does that then how much code am I going to have to have my security team check and with the thousands of lines of unnecessary code injected into my system we are going to bottleneck. Just do your job and code or use a reliable fullstack no-code platform to help you pass the boring code part and get to solving the problem quicker. We need to be agile and react as fast as possible to market changes and normalise our vast lakes of data. Data is money not AI, well not yet anyway.” – CTO of a Top 100 USA company.
AI bottoms out
A few more years pass and we don’t see anything valuable past this AI hype, well except that we can now create some great blog posts, chatbots and train our own LLM to automate some workflows. Oh yes and of course, there are some great services that can help in the fields of medicine, manufacturing, climate change or future predictions based on vast amounts of historical data to help us plan ahead. Those that control these large enterprises still need control. It’s the human gut feel that makes them who they are and the people that work with them to realise the company’s vision. So why should enterprises welcome AI and just believe that it will run their business for them. “Great I don’t have to even work anymore and deal with staff, they all got fired anyway because AI does their work now. AI will do all the work and become an autonomous money maker taking money from people I didn’t even know could be my customers?” NO SIR!
After the hype we will see many one hit AI wonders disappear with all the data, all the money and of course who will pick that all up, well you guessed, the massive software companies that have enough reserves to see this through and like vultures pick on the left overs and acquire startups for 1 cent to the dollar if anything at all.
AI begins to make sense
We are hearing statements from very reliable sources that I tend to side with. AI is not the be all and end all of the future of technology. AI is, and should stay, the assistant to mankind in meaningful ways. Let’s just say it’s like buying your first scientific calculator that can produce results instantly instead of just pen and paper. A super abacus for those who know how to use it, and not everyone does or even wants to in some cases.
Like a griffin rising from the ashes AI will eventually present meaningful use cases that support enterprises, humans and the environment. Like the invention of the Internet, some said it’s the end of humanity and then later realised the advantages of global connectivity but has it really changed beyond what it was made for? No, the Internet is still the Internet and at its core will always be the Internet.
Who will the heroes be?
Those that embrace AI for its supportive role and apply it where it makes the most sense will rise with the griffin and be the heroes of AI in the future.