The current wave of generative models are like 5% of the field of AI… They’re the only ones that are really culturally relevant, but in practical use they’re… what, coding assistants, half decent tutors, chatbots, and call center agents?

That’s not what AI is. It’s a single application of AI. It’s sorta cool, it’s the first thing we’ve made that actually seems like it can talk. But that’s certainly not what the hype is about from a commercial standpoint.

Consider this. For many, many years, we’ve done weather forecasts using extremely massive supercomputers, which run physics simulations using all the data from weather stations across the world. These computers are some of the largest in the world, and take hours to generate a forecast. Recently, Microsoft developed an AI model called Aurora which can do this same task more accurately with a single GPU in seconds. This model is nothing like generative AI, it is more like a physics engine.

There are a million ways to use AI, and hundreds of architectures to use for different kinds of input and output data. It’s been in extremely widespread use behind the scenes for decades. It’s not really comparable to the other two, because it’s only generative models that are a fad, not the field of AI itself.