Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this newsletter…why a legal AI startup shows there's more to the AI boom than just foundation models; Zoox starts offering robotaxi rides in San Francisco; it's worryingly easy to jailbreak LLM-powered robots; is foundation model progress topping out?
There’s been a lot of talk this past week about whether the progress of general-purpose foundation models might be hitting a wall and what that means for the AI boom. (More on this in the Brain Food section below.)
Some skeptics, such as Gary Marcus, are predicting a reckoning on par with the dotcom crash. I will be discussing this very topic tomorrow at Web Summit in Lisbon, moderating a center stage conversation at 4:25 pm local time on “Is the AI Bubble About to Burst?” with Moveworks CEO Bhavin Shah and the AI Now Institute’s co-executive director Sarah Myers West. You can check it out on the Web Summit livestream!
My view is that even if foundation model progress is decelerating, it may not matter as much for companies implementing AI applications for specific industries as it does for companies such as OpenAI whose $157 billion valuation seems largely predicated on achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). Or at least it's predicated on a scenario in which OpenAI remains at the forefront of model development and has some kind of defensible moat around its business, which won't be the case if building ever bigger LLMs doesn't confer a significant capability advantage to justify the cost.
