Over the past month, I have had several discussions with people looking to make strategic decisions about leveraging existing Generative AI platforms in their businesses.
While I am a big proponent of using AI to improve your business and efficiency, I am urging caution about banking too much of your business with these large public Gen AI platforms. Too many people see the unrealistic hype around these tools and rush to join the Gold Rush without developing strategies and truly addressing risks.
The biggest risks are that the hype does not match reality (which it won’t), public LLMs introduce serious intellectual property, privacy, and security problems, and potentially most significant is the long-term viability of the tools.
I am unaware of any major LLM platform that generates positive cash flow. They are all bleeding cash at an alarming and increasing rate. This trend calls into question if most of these tools will exist in the next 18 months. Certainly, the number of offerings will diminish as the market shakes out and technology advancements begin to drop the operating costs of these massive LLMs significantly.
For now, the smart business play is concentrating your strategic AI investments and efforts on using Machine Learning (ML) and private models to improve your products and make more informed decisions. Today, you can use mature tools to build custom and private ML models trained using your data to create compact and economical models. These models can then be used to enhance your product offerings, improve service, better understand your customers, and quickly spot trends and drivers arising in the market.
AWS, Google, Microsoft, and many other providers offer cloud ML tools that you can leverage for a reasonable expense. Using these types of tools and owning your focused models will let you better control your destiny while still finding gold.
