This is a far cry from the reputation of the field in the 1990s, when Wooldridge was pursuing his Ph.D. AI was still seen as a strange and frontier pursuit. The wider technical sector viewed it in a similar way to how established medicine views homeopathy, he says.
Today’s AI research boom was fueled by neural networks, which made major breakthroughs in the 1980s and work by simulating the patterns of the human brain. At the time, technology hit a wall because computers at the time weren’t powerful enough to run software. Today, we have large amounts of data and very powerful computers to make this technology viable.
New breakthroughs like chatbot ChatGPT and text-to-image model Stable Diffusion seem to come out every few months. Technologies like ChatGPT are still understudied, and both industry and academia are still exploring how they can help, Stone said.
Instead of a full-blown AI winter, Long-term AI research funding likely to decline There’s also the pressure to make money with technology, says Wooldridge. Researchers in corporate labs will be under pressure to show that their research can be integrated into products and make money from it, he added.
it’s already happening. In light of OpenAI’s success with ChatGPT, Google has declared a “Code Red” threat landscape for its core product, search, and is actively seeking to improve it with its own AI research.
Stone sees parallels to what happened at Bell Labs. When the big tech AI labs that dominate the field turned away from deep, long-term research and focused too much on short-term product development, resentful AI researchers moved to academia and forced these big labs to may lose track of innovation. he says.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are a lot of smart people looking for jobs right now. Venture capitalists are looking for new startups to invest in as cryptocurrencies collapse, and generative AI is showing how technology can be turned into products.
This moment offers the AI sector a once-in-a-generation opportunity to test the possibilities of new technologies. Despite the dark clouds over job cuts, it’s an exciting prospect.
