Published on Friday, 2025-12-26
It’s almost the end of the first quarter of XXI century. I may not know what the "age of AI" is, but I am apparently living in it. At the same time, people all around me are attacking it on all fronts, some even call for a complete ban. This not where I stand. You see, I believe AI has the power to transform the society in a better state than it is, to make all of us better.
This, however, is not the AI we keep hearing about, and this is the root of all evil. When I say AI, I mean the entirety of Artificial Intelligence. When I hear AI, in most cases, someone is talking about Generative AI. I always try to make a distinction between them, as everything good I can s…
Published on Friday, 2025-12-26
It’s almost the end of the first quarter of XXI century. I may not know what the "age of AI" is, but I am apparently living in it. At the same time, people all around me are attacking it on all fronts, some even call for a complete ban. This not where I stand. You see, I believe AI has the power to transform the society in a better state than it is, to make all of us better.
This, however, is not the AI we keep hearing about, and this is the root of all evil. When I say AI, I mean the entirety of Artificial Intelligence. When I hear AI, in most cases, someone is talking about Generative AI. I always try to make a distinction between them, as everything good I can say about AI does not apply to GenAI. AI is a very broad term, even broader than Machine Learning. We’ve got (or, sadly, had) great search engines, image analysis, autonomous vehicles, weather prediction, protein modelling, medical diagnosis, disaster management and plenty of other use cases. As always, Wikipedia is your friend. All of them have one thing in common: they can be used for good. All of them are great.
But we’ve also got the Gen, the LLMs and Diffusion models. Those are designed for other use: to replace, decrease costs by eliminating humans. GenAI may be a terrible tool applied to fields where it fails, but it became synonymous with AI. All the layoffs, artists depressions, environmental destruction, theft, billionaire making, attack on society is encompassed by the Generative type of AI. When all you see is money, the rest is insignificant - in comparison to the trillions wasted on GenAI, the last 70 years of the rest of AI was funded by pennies.
AI can be a way to achieve what was impossible, to augument humans, but that’s not what GenAI dealers are selling. What VCs are buying is an AI which tried to destroy those humans.
I don’t believe we are living in an AI bubble - most of it will prevail, like it always was, as they are not even funded now. We are living in GenAI and datacentre bubble, and don’t think Gen will is not necessarily "not going away" as people say. Sure, the technology is not going anywhere, but it’s already expensive when every provider loosing money on it. What will happen when the golden tap of VC money shower will disappear? Who will pay the real price of slop? We don’t even know what the real price even is, as all we know that inference is expensive, model training is extremely expensive, and the cost of infrastructure is incomprehensible. The Billion Disney gave to OpenAI is nothing. The revenue is a drop in a pool of costs and there is still no clear net-positive use case.
The risk I see is that all of AI will get hit by the GenAI and, personally, I estimate the to to be at 100% which it will be shame. The good uses will be as under the radar as they are now, but the population will see no difference between ChatGPT and a weather model. This is why I always use the name GenAI when I mean GenAI. AI as a whole is much more important and has huge, positive potential.