>I doubt we will talk a lot about AI in five years because AI will be an integral part of how people search for and interact with information. Or, if we talk about AI in five years, it will most likely refer to different technologies and solutions than what we denote as AI in 2024.<p>It's the latter. In 5 years, what we consider to be AI today will just be standard product features and the AI being discussed will be some new set of capabilities that are just being developed, and the same will happen 5 years after that.
Yep. We rarely talk about “the internet” because everything is the internet. We even more rarely talk about transistors, outside of tech enthusiast circles. And electrons get even less attention.<p>AI is an ingredient that will power products and experiences, and we will talk about those.
I don't mind the classification that "machine learning equals AI plus time". To me, AI is any surprisingly effective use of machine learning. As time goes by we expect more, but you'd have to be the most cynical curmudgeon in the world not to look at the last 15-20 years and be amazed at what we've achieved. But that doesn't mean that anything short of AGI now will fail to justify the hype. I'm not going to begrudge the hype if self-driving cars roll out to more countries, or if I get a robot doing household chores in 10 years time.
AI right now reminds me exactly of the blockchain/crypto hype. People trying to apply blockchain to everything, calling something a "blockchain" based solution. However, blockchain based solutions never panned out, as it was an attempt to apply technologies to use cases rather than solving actual problems. Now when you say "blockchain based X", people will scoff at you. AI will follow the same path I believe, as LLMs are less applicable to solve meaningful problems than expected.
Yes. Most SaaS tools are just CRUD operations on databases. But no-one talks about databases as a magical tool anymore - even thought thats what they were in the 1990s with Oracle vs. Sybase vs. Informix vs. Ingres.
But is this still true considering LLMs? Is it possible that LLMs could save AI?<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42431690">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42431690</a>
The next eventual leap in ML, RL, and AI could come from large quantum computing based accelerated training of models. It might take twenty years to get there, however.
TLDR version:<p>This is not to say that we will not talk about AI at all in five years, in the same way that we still talk about big data today, only that we will not talk about AI in five years because of its success.