Billions are being pumped into AI, but the hype seems to be over for now

This article was last updated on August 12, 2024

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Billions are being pumped into AI, but the hype seems to be over for now

Almost 100 billion euros. That is the amount that the largest tech companies will invest in AI (artificial intelligence) in the first half of 2024. have invested. And it will be much more, they say. The ‘AI race’ is still in full swing.

At the same time, it seems that the hype that arose after the release of ChatGPT has passed its peak. It is specifically about developing applications with what we call generative AI: artificial intelligence that is able to generate text, audio, video or images based on commands.

“I think we’re beyond the hype when we talk about generative AI being the solution to every problem,” says Noëlle Cicilia, managing partner at Brush AI. “But it can still be valuable. We have to use the technology for the problems it is intended for. You can try to hammer a nail into the wall with a brick, but it works a lot better with a hammer.”

Huge breakthrough

Mona de Boer of consultancy firm PwC and professors Emiel Krahmer and Virginia Dignum also see that the hype is dying down somewhat. “You see the critical voices about the limitations of generative AI and the investments being made worldwide increasing,” notes De Boer, who characterizes this as a normal development.

But professor Evangelos Kanoulas does not think the hype is over. He mainly sees that there is a brake on this from the European Union, but that it continues at full speed in the rest of the world.

Krahmer calls the release of ChatGPT “a really huge breakthrough”. Suddenly there is a chatbot that produces fluent and coherent texts and that can be interacted with. But he also observes that from a consumer perspective, improvements to the underlying technology, the language models, are now taking place in small steps.

Hot breath on the neck

It also activated companies that have been working on AI for years, but in a different form. Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple fell over each other recently to announce new features.

They feel the hot breath of start-ups on their necks and would like to maintain their position of power. They have a major advantage: an existing revenue model with which they can finance high investments in AI.

But that doesn’t mean everything works at once. For example, Google suffered a significant decline at the beginning of last year with the introduction of Bard, a competitor of ChatGPT. He blundered with answers, which had a direct effect on the stock price.

In May this year, the tech giant introduced a new version of the search engine, laced with AI. But he also made serious mistakes. Google has to walk on eggshells.

Meta wants to profit by integrating a smart AI assistant into Instagram and WhatsApp, among others. The company hoped to attract users by partly working with celebrities, but that plan has already been thrown in the trash. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently expressed the hope that ‘Meta AI’ will be the most used assistant by the end of the year.

Everything has started a little slower at Apple. The company arrived in June with a major update from his voice assistant Siri. A lot is expected of that. The first changes should be visible this autumn.

But so far this is disappointing, writes Leading tech journalist Mark Gurman, who has been following the company for years, said: “As it stands, they are far from the breakthrough technology hoped for.”

‘Don’t talk about AI race’

Professor Dignum is annoyed by the idea of ​​an ‘AI race’: “After all, a race has an end point and a single direction, we do not see that in AI. There is not a moment where we are ‘done’ and can determine a winner .”

She compares the current situation with Playdoh, children’s clay. AI as different colors of clay mixed together to form an “unclear mass”, making it harder to get a grip on.