IT IS NO LONGER A CONSPIRACY THEORY

On a separate topic, I've noticed that you and a few others on here who know a lot more about LLMs than I do seem to feel that an AI Winter will probably occur in the next year or year and a half or so. I am curious what the reasoning is.

Most people are concerned about the AI bubble popping, and some people conflate that with AI Winter, and to be fair the AI bubble and AI Winter are interconnected.

I am anticipating both, but not necessarily at the same time. The bubble popping would almost certainly trigger an AI Winter soon thereafter, but an AI Winter might not be followed by the AI bubble popping for a year or two, possibly three.

My perspective on AI Winter is mainly shaped by my experiences of being active in the field during the second AI Winter of the early 1990s. That AI Winter was caused by overhyping and overpromising on AI technology, which led to unrealistic expectations. When those expectations were not met, the customers (entirely corporate and government, for that AI Summer) became disillusioned, and that disillusionment caused a widespread backlash against AI products. I understand that the first AI Winter was caused by a similar dynamic, but cannot say from personal experience, as I am too young to have been active in the field in the 1960s.

Note that this dynamic had nothing to do with AI technology, and everything to do with people's perceptions and attitudes. There is no technology so capable that it cannot be overhyped, and overhyping inevitably results in disillusionment.

I have been predicting another AI Winter for a few years now, mainly because I have observed similar overhyping and overpromising during the current AI Summer. The most extreme overpromising by certain industry leaders is that AGI/ASI is "right around the corner", the inevitable result of incrementally improving LLM technology.

Of course LLM technology is intrinsically narrow-AI, and cannot be incrementally improved into AGI. Disillusionment is inevitable, and I expect there will be a popular backlash similar to the previous AI Winters.

When that happens, the technology will not go away, but it will be differently marketed, prioritized, and funded. AI technology has always continued to be developed during AI Winters, but at reduced pace, visibility, and diversity, and due to The AI Effect it is no longer perceived as "AI", but as "just technology". We still use compilers, regular expressions, databases, search engines, robotics, OCR, etc, but nobody thinks of them as "AI", even though they were technologies which emerged from the first two AI Summers.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article about it which goes into more detail if you're interested.

As for the AI bubble, that is purely a matter of sustainability and funding. That overlaps with AI Winter in that AI Winter also usually marks a reduction of funding (both venture capital funding and academic funding), but the causes are somewhat different.

This article does a much better job than I could of explaining why the AI industry as it exists today is unsustainable, and what the bubble popping would look like -- https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

Note that the author wrote that article before Anthropic raised their subscription prices and nerfed their models, which are two of the things he proposed would mark the beginning of the end. We will see how customers react. How many will stick around, and how many will bail? Exciting times!

Anyway, I've been saying for a couple of years that we're due for the next AI Winter some time around 2027, but it might not happen until 2029, but I will be very, very surprised if we don't see it before the end of 2029. I still feel pretty comfortable with that prognostication.

As for the AI bubble bursting, there are factors which might push it out further than that. Right now, Anthropic is fully funded to 2028. They have until then to turn a net profit before they have to either raise more funding, close their doors, or get acquired by a business with deep enough pockets to keep it rolling. They can conceivably stretch that beyond 2028 if they cut back on their model training expenditures (which are huge). Thus even if AI Winter hits in 2027, Anthropic might continue to offer Claude until 2029 or 2030.

OpenAI's finances are a little more mysterious. Nobody outside the company knows exactly when their funding might run out. We'll just have to wait and see how things develop.