If you feel like you can’t keep up with the deluge of AI announcements, you’re not alone.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt summed up what many of us were thinking at the VivaTech conference in Paris earlier this week: “It seems confusing.”
Over the past two weeks, developers and consumers have been bombarded with a constant stream of AI updates and product launches, showing just how heated the AI race has become.
OpenAI kicked off a wave of AI news by first introducing its new version of ChatGPT, powered by its new flagship GPT-4o model, which can have more human-like conversations and reasoning through audio, vision and text.
A day later, Google held its two-hour I/O conference, which showcased a series of new updates and launches related to its Gemini AI, including Project Astra, customizable “Gems” assistants, and a preview of AI-generated research.
On Tuesday, Microsoft introduced more than 50 new products and partnerships at its annual developers conference, which lasted more than two hours. Next month, Apple is expected to announce its entry into the generative AI race with the reveal of iOS 18 at its WWDC event.
There are so many new announcements that it’s becoming difficult to keep track of what’s happening and what’s coming soon. So what can we expect in the future – and will the announcements ever slow down?
BI spoke to Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished vice president and analyst at Gartner, to find out.
How we got here
It’s not uncommon for companies to compete aggressively for the best deals, and this trend is often seen in a technology hype cycle, such as when PCs and smartphones first appeared.
Simply put, “all technology cycles happen like this,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a recent interview with Bloomberg.
Gartner’s Chandrasekaran gave two reasons why the wave of AI announcements is happening now. First, there is a psychological reason.
“Everyone wants to be heard over the noise,” Chandrasekaran said.
That means there will be a lot of so-called AI washing and AI marketing as companies fight for a chance to get noticed, Chandrasekaran added.
He also said that there have been huge investments in AI and technology between 2015 and 2022, leading to hundreds of startups simultaneously attempting to expand their capabilities. It has also led to continued waves of layoffs across the sector as companies recover from the excessive hiring that occurred during this era.
The result of this climate
The result is that business leaders are overwhelmed by the pace of product releases, Chandrasekaran said. There is also a sense of fatigue in the industry as people are inundated with new announcements.
Chandrasekaran said this makes it difficult for business executives to make long-term bets in the AI space because everything they see in the market now is likely to change soon.
“They prefer stability over speed,” Chandrasekaran said of business leaders.
“They provide services to their customers where reliability, performance and all these things are of utmost importance to them,” added Chandrasekaran.
But with more product launches, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure reliability as well as a stable set of deliverable services, Chandrasekaran said.
Chandrasekaran said that while some high-quality products and startups will become the next tech giants, there is also a lot of AI washing in the market today. That, and some vendors claim to have AI-related capabilities that aren’t actually AI.
“They could use a simple rules-based engine,” Chandrasekaran said. “And they could call it AI or use more traditional machine learning and call it Gen AI.”
When will it slow down?
Chandrasekaran said many startups may not make it to the next round of funding because they are not market fit or do not have a clear path to profitability.
We will start to see this moment of decision in the second half of 2024 through 2025, Chandrasekaran predicted.
When some of this dust starts to settle with startups, Chandrasekaran said the large vendor ecosystem will feel less pressure and will also start to slow down.
“It’s kind of a vicious cycle that I think will be broken at some point,” Chandrasekaran said.
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