American-AI versus International-AI

Leveling the playing field in science and commerce for everyone

The concept of a chatbot powered by American AI is proposed as the next generation of AI as depicted by a row of AI agents helping out above. Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

In 2014, Deep Learning was exploding around the world as corporations were told to “embrace conversational AI.” Nobody wanted to miss out, and the idea that a chatbot was now ready for prime time was pushed everywhere. But it wasn’t. Language is more than just recognizing a sequence of words (called an intent).

We have the parallel today in which companies are told not to miss out on the AI revolution using generative-AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) or maybe just ‘ChatGPT.’ The same enthusiasm to “do AI” is now pushing something that really can’t do the job properly.

So rewinding to 2014, what happened to the idea that language was now solved with AI/Deep Learning? There were hundreds of startups all funded to find a domain that they could excel in and rent a big-tech platform to drive it as a part of their business model.

Now the idea is that startups can all pay a tech giant to rent their LLM, but again the technology isn’t ready for prime time. Last time the effort for developers to capture a conversational flow was out of reach with the Deep Learning tools available. This time, LLMs don’t include human-like meaning and so cannot help a developer control a conversation or access Legacy databases…