Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.
Just about all businesses these days seem to be pivoting to AI, even when they don’t seem to know exactly why they’re investing in it—or even what it really does. “Optimization,” “scaling,” and “maximizing efficiency” are convenient buzzwords bandied about to describe what AI can achieve in theory, but for most of AI companies’ eager customers, the hundreds of billions of dollars they’re pumping into the industry aren’t adding up. And maybe they never will.
This month’s news doesn’t exactly cast the technology in a glowing light either. A bunch of NGOs and aid agencies are using AI models to generate images of fake suffering people to guilt their Instagram followers. AI translators are pumping out low-quality Wikipedia pages in the languages most vulnerable to going extinct. And thanks to the construction of new AI data centers, lots of neighborhoods living in their shadows are getting forced into their own sort of pivots—fighting back against the power blackouts and water shortages the data centers cause. How’s that for optimization?