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The original was posted on /r/machinelearning by /u/Stevens97 on 2024-04-02 11:37:50.

This post might be a bit ranty, but i feel more and more share this sentiment with me as of late. If you bother to read this whole post feel free to share how you feel about this.

When OpenAI put the knowledge of AI in the everyday household, I was at first optimistic about it. In smaller countries outside the US, companies were very hesitant before about AI, they thought it felt far away and something only big FANG companies were able to do. Now? Its much better. Everyone is interested in it and wants to know how they can use AI in their business. Which is great!

Pre-ChatGPT-times, when people asked me what i worked with and i responded “Machine Learning/AI” they had no clue and pretty much no further interest (Unless they were a tech-person)

Post-ChatGPT-times, when I get asked the same questions I get “Oh, you do that thing with the chatbots?”

Its a step in the right direction, I guess. I don’t really have that much interest in LLMs and have the privilege to work exclusively on vision related tasks unlike some other people who have had to pivot to working full time with LLMs.

However, right now I think its almost doing more harm to the field than good. Let me share some of my observations, but before that I want to highlight I’m in no way trying to gatekeep the field of AI in any way.

I’ve gotten job offers to be “ChatGPT expert”, What does that even mean? I strongly believe that jobs like these don’t really fill a real function and is more of a “hypetrain”-job than a job that fills any function at all.

Over the past years I’ve been going to some conferences around Europe, one being last week, which has usually been great with good technological depth and a place for Data-scientists/ML Engineers to network, share ideas and collaborate. However, now the talks, the depth, the networking has all changed drastically. No longer is it new and exiting ways companies are using AI to do cool things and push the envelope, its all GANs and LLMs with surface level knowledge. The few “old-school” type talks being sent off to a 2nd track in a small room

The panel discussions are filled with philosophists with no fundamental knowledge of AI talking about if LLMs will become sentient or not. The spaces for data-scientists/ML engineers are quickly dissapearing outside the academic conferences, being pushed out by the current hypetrain.

The hypetrain evangelists also promise miracles and gold with LLMs and GANs, miracles that they will never live up to. When the investors realize that the LLMs cant live up to these miracles they will instantly get more hesitant with funding for future projects within AI, sending us back into an AI-winter once again.

EDIT: P.S. I’ve also seen more people on this reddit appearing claiming to be “Generative AI experts”. But when delving deeper it turns out they are just “good prompters” and have no real knowledge, expertice or interest in the actual field of AI or Generative AI.