AI startups are attracting investor capital and achieving exorbitant valuations early in their life cycle. Many people believe that the AI industry is in a bubble.
Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere, which creates custom AI models for commercial customers, recently told TechCrunch's Found podcast that he does not believe the AI industry is in a bubble. While he admits the froth, he believes that calling it a bubble undermines companies like his own Cohere, which are developing really helpful products for their clients.
“Frequently I’ll run into something where I’ll see somebody using our model, and they will have enabled some completely new feature that wasn’t possible before or they’ll have automated some process that was really bogging them down and slowing everything up,” Frosst said. “And like that’s tangible value. It’s hard for there to be a complete bubble when you have something so useful.”
But it doesn't mean Frosst is optimistic about anything the industry is building. He believes AI will never achieve artificial general intelligence, defined as human-level intellect, which differs significantly from the narratives of some of Frosst's AI colleagues, including Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang. He went on to say that even if the industry does eventually get there, it will take some time.
"I don't think we're gonna have digital gods anywhere, anytime soon," Frosst advised. "And I believe that more and more people are realizing how great this technology is. It's quite powerful and handy. It is not a computerized God. And that necessitates a shift in your perspective on technology.
Today, Cohere uses that main model as a base to build custom models for enterprise clients.
“We specialize as people. We go into particular fields. But the first part of our education is just about how to use language in general,” Frosst said. “We spent a long time learning how to read and write. It’s not until very later that you kind of specify on a particular subfield of language. So there’s something kind of similar going on with neural nets as well.”
Despite his belief that larger, foundational models will triumph in his industry — among those developing such services — he does not believe enterprise organizations should expect their own single models to handle everything: consumer duties, B2B tasks, and product tasks.
According to Frosst, firms who wish to successfully deploy AI technology should focus on and understand what AI technology can and cannot achieve.
"We're pretty sober about how this technology is useful, and what value it can deliver, and to be clear, an insane amount of value," Frosst told reporters. "But I don't believe it will lead to the extinction of humanity. And so we're able to take a more practical approach that may spare us from some of the extreme hyperbole on both sides."