It seems like every day another company announces a new generative AI product or service. Generative AI is everything tech companies want to talk about, from apps that summarize meetings to platforms that help with photo editing and customer support bots.
Still, not all generative AI software is a breakthrough like OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot, which started this new technological revolution. But don’t expect that to slow down the seemingly endless parade of platforms and tools coming to market. Even if some of those products seemed doomed from the start.
“I think we’re in a kind of ‘spaghetti-to-the-wall’ phase,” said Emily DeJew, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.
“We’re just trying to figure out… what are the use cases for this? And to figure that out, it’s pretty much… we’re going to do everything with it.”
Generative AI everywhere
The fact that generative AI is creating a plethora of new products is not that surprising. After all, we’ve seen the tech industry respond to big trends like this before.
“[It] This is very reminiscent of the dot-com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. Everybody there was thinking, ‘I have to get a website,'” explains Jennifer Golbeck, director and professor at American University’s Social Intelligence Laboratory. Maryland.
“They didn’t really know what they wanted to do with it, but they just didn’t want to be left out, and they were very attracted to the promise of what the technology would do,” she said. added.
And just like the dot-com boom, we’re also seeing some seemingly unnecessary generative AI capabilities emerge. Consider that Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Samsung offer AI features that change the tone of your text messages to sound more or less professional.
“[The] The vast majority of these vendors are trying to find product-market fit, but they don’t have product-market fit yet,” said Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished Vice President and Analyst at Gartner. says.
In other words, some companies are releasing generative AI products and services even when customer wants and needs don’t seem to exist.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, explains Stefano Puntoni, co-director of AI at Wharton. After all, experimenting with different generative AI products will inevitably help the best rise to the top, while the worst will fall by the wayside.
turbulent market
Still, the glut of generative AI products also has the potential to cause confusion among enterprise customers and consumers.
“This is completely overwhelming technology buyers…whether they’re consumers or corporate CIOs,” Chandrasekaran explained. “This is really overwhelming for them and the choices they have are [they are] We’re really trying to figure out the differences between these different companies, different products, and what they offer. ”
On top of that, AI products are evolving at a breakneck pace, making it difficult for customers to keep up.
It’s not just the sheer number of new AI services. Some companies market their software as generative or AI-powered, but that’s actually not the case, a practice known as AI-washing.
“I think a really important part of this issue is that there are a lot of different things being called AI, but not all of them are actually part of this revolution that we’re going through. I don’t think so,” explained FutureTech research director Neil Thompson. A project of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In December, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler warned companies that they would face negative consequences if they did not oppose AI cleaning plans.
We are still in the early stages of the generative AI revolution. This means companies will launch even more AI-powered products and services in the coming months. Some companies will survive, others will fail, and the industry will just have to wait and see which companies come out on top.
Daniel Howley I’m the technology editor at Yahoo Finance. He has been covering the technology industry since his 2011. You can follow him on Twitter. @Daniel Howley.
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