Artificial Intelligence or simply AI has been the buzzword for most social discourses over the past year and a half. This has been further fueled by the business interest, especially, the interest of Wall Street in the field.

Is AI Hype Deflating

Many established tech companies have poured in their resources, meanwhile, other market forces have given their resources in old or new ventures working on AI.

But, is this hype and the newly discovered gold rush deflating?

That is what Zoho's Sridhar Vembu has to say on the apparent slowdown in the interest, and how this would aid the progress of the company.

In a post on X, Vembu enlisted the total current capabilities of AI.

He asked, "In terms of business use, what are the areas in which AI is useful today? I will list some":

1. Speech to text, text to speech, image recognition, authentication based on photos/videos/speech/..

2. Image to text (character recognition) and extracting meta data and data from images/PDFs etc

3. Spam detection, phishing detection and fraud detection

4. Security threat analysis

5. Identifying patterns in data in a variety of financial/business/legal/medical/engineering/scientific scenarios. There is a huge category of uses here.

6. Programmer assistance via code generation, particularly UI code generation, and help finding bugs.

7. Marketing content generation, design of brochures, websites, campaigns, emails and so on. If abused, this results in "AI slop" where humans know something is AI generated when they see it!

Waiting For The Hype To Pass

Highlighting the technology, and how it has been in use for longer than AI, Vembu further added that one thing to keep in mind is that many of these use cases predate LLMs. We used to call this field "machine learning" and those tools are in widespread use.

Working In The Trenches

Vembu compared and elucidated on the hype surrounding the technology and suggested that Wall Street investment looks for instant results, which is not something that can be necessarily attained. Vembu also focused on the need to temper expectations.

Vembu said, "I am most excited about 4-5-6 categories, particularly 6. This is where AI can provide "actions" or "workflows" or more ambitiously autonomous "agents". That last part is the holy grail but vastly overhyped. In that sense autonomous AI agents are like self-driving cars: don't get too taken by the hype but engineers in the trenches are making progress."

Vembu focused on the need for investment in R&D, but, that should entail mindless splurge.

According to him, when hype meets Wall Street, a lot of money gets thrown at it (be it the optical bubble, the real estate bubble, or now the AI bubble), and then Wall Street gets tired and walks away. That is when the real engineers get excited (I have an optical fibre connection in my remote village!). I prefer working down in the trenches. Will surface to share my findings once in a while!

Will Not Overhype

In another post, Vembu further highlighted the deflation in the fad and hype surrounding AI.

In the post, he said, "One fact about the recent AI hype is that corporate customers and analysts are not terribly excited. They are in a "prove it to me" mode, as they should be.

I am in the camp that overhyping anything is a bad idea. I am personally enthusiastic about some technologies but I will not overhype them."