Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…no sign of an AI slowdown at Web Summit; work on Amazon’s new Alexa plagued by further technical issues; a general purpose robot model; trying to bend Trump’s ear on AI policy.
Last week, I was at Web Summit in Lisbon, where AI was everywhere. There was a strange disconnect, however, between the mood at the conference, where so many companies were touting AI-powered products and features, and the tenor of AI news last week—much of which was focused on reports that the AI companies building foundation models were seeing diminishing returns from building ever larger AI models and rampant speculation in some quarters that the AI hype cycle was about to end.
I moderated a center stage panel discussion on whether the AI bubble is about to burst, and I heard two very different, but not diametrically opposed, takes. (You can check it out on YouTube.) Bhavin Shah, the CEO of Moveworks, which offers an AI-powered service to big companies that allows employees to get their IT questions automatically answered, argued—as you might expect—that not only is the bubble not about to burst, that it isn’t even clear there’s a bubble.
