Hype around generative AI: Has it already ‘jumped the shark’?

It has only been around a number of years, however the query is already emerging: Has the hype around generative AI reached its peak?

As businesses have a look at gen AI today and understand its impressive innovation potential, it’s also a heavyweight system that comes with significant costs and complexities, in response to David Linthicum, research analyst for theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio.

“We’re … attempting to work out what it’s and what we will use it for,” Linthicum said in a recent AI Insights and Innovation series podcast from theCUBE, which features the newest news, trends and insights in artificial intelligence, with a give attention to generative AI. On this edition, Linthicum looks beyond the hype around generative AI adoption to look at emerging options for businesses.

Hype around generative AI: The great, the bad, the ugly

The conversation around gen AI has shifted from just specializing in its potential. Now, it’s about its real-world challenges and limitations

“Business leaders are increasingly concerned with issues like practicality, costs and the challenge of integrating it into existing business processes,” Linthicum said. “With the rise of ChatGPT people can see the worth in it. “Obviously, it has had a number of value it will probably bring to applications, to business … since it’s capable of generate recent uses of knowledge.”

Nonetheless, as Linthicum points out, the very features that make generative AI so powerful also contribute to its limitations.

“It takes an enormous amount of information, processing power and money to coach these systems,” he said. “So, as business leaders have a look at the applications or the use cases for generative AI, they’re often unclear concerning the use cases for his or her particular organization.”

Generative AI just isn’t going away, but there could also be higher options for a lot of businesses, Linthicum added.

“We understand the facility of gen AI, and the worth of it’s getting clearer with all the brand new releases of LLMs on the market,” he noted. “But businesses, CIOs, CEOs, boards of directors are…attempting to work out if that is…actually going to supply business value for them.”

There’s a number of hype around generative AI, together with inaccurate or misleading information from AI-generated news articles, or summaries that contain factual errors or lack of context. Normally, gen AI technologies “go a mile wide and an inch deep … because they only have information that they’ve been trained to supply,” in response to Linthicum.

But when it comes right down to day-to-day operations, many CIOs are finding that traditional technologies might serve their needs just as well, if not higher, at a fraction of the fee. There’s a number of interest in gen AI, even amongst employees, but clear use cases are still hard to discover.

“Additionally they see when they give the impression of being at the fee … they simply don’t have enough budget to deploy a few of these huge generative AI systems … for his or her particular business case,” Linthicum said.

Is agentic AI the following big thing?

Many business implementing gen AI systems aren’t necessarily taking a look at other options, reminiscent of agentic AI, which relies on a less-expensive technology leveraging flexible AI agents that may be embedded with certain business processes, not necessarily entire systems. Linthicum sees a shift within the industry toward lightweight deployment of those AI-based systems that may leverage smaller, more specialized AI models for specific tasks.

“Agentic AI represents a return to a more tactical use of AI, where the main target is on solving specific business problems with smaller, more manageable systems,” Linthicum said. “These systems don’t require the large resources of LLMs, making them more accessible to a broader range of companies.”

“Those have been around for a very long time,” he noted. “They’re going to be cheaper and due to this fact deliver more value to the business.”

Linthicum suggests that companies should explore how agentic AI and other lightweight technologies can complement and even replace generative AI in certain scenarios. What the marketplace is seeing is the normalization of the hype around generative AI, finding real applications for it and how one can make it financially viable for firms.

There are other challenges around “governance, strategic integration, ongoing innovation … and with security. All these forms of things are problems … [that] still should be solved,” Linthicum added. “Generative AI just isn’t going away — that is exciting technology. And it’s going to have some value. It’s just being oversold right away.”

Businesses should be realistic about gen AI’s limitations. The goal must be to make use of it in ways in which make sense for the business, not only to follow the newest trend, Linthicum advised.

“Businesses are aligning themselves in other directions in some instances,” Linthicum said. “They’re taking a look at other options, agentic AI, non-AI systems, workflow-based systems [and] robotics process automation … to supply more tactical uses of AI. And I believe that’s the smart thing to do.”

Remember to try more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of agentic AI in these articles: Gen AI is passe. Enter the age of agentic AI  and Wait, will gen AI really repay? Inquiring investors need to know

Here’s theCUBE’s complete episode of the “AI Insights and Innovation” podcast:

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer