Summary
This might well be the most fraught moment in generative AI’s young lifespan. We’re smack in the middle of AI‘s smoke and mirrors moment, and the question is what will be left when it clears. This combination of widespread uncertainty and dominance of the zeitgeist continues to serve the AI companies.
In the 1660s, an inventor, probably, one Christiaan Huygens, created the first “magic lantern” The device used a concave mirror to intensify the light of a candle flame to project an image on a slide. For the first time, an intangible image could be made “real”
The technology was embraced by illusionists and magicians, and, naturally, by grifters who took the tech from town to town claiming to be able to conjure the spirits of the underworld, for a fee. The new technology allowed its operators to create a more convincing vessel for demonstrating an abstract, even unprovable, force.
Report after report indicates that generative AI services are underperforming in the corporate world. The stock of Nvidia, whose chips undergird the AI boom, is tanking. OpenAI’s much-ballyhooed GPT store has so far come up short.
Companies are very eager to embrace technological tools to either replace human workers or wield as leverage against them. Any threat to that show, however, is a threat to the generative AI enterprise at large. Once the public, or at least the middle managers, get tired of waiting for real labor savings, the facade may begin to fall away.
