Will Manidis, the founder of AI-driven healthcare startup ScienceIO, stated that generative AI is all flash and no substance. While it might not be attracting a lot of cash right now, for example, Stability AI just raked in a cool $101 million in funding for its Stable Diffusion system. But in the future, most generative AI ventures will fade into startup oblivion. On Tuesday, Will Manidis said that “There are hundreds of millions of dollars being deployed towards glorified tech demos built on top of identical datasets,” the founder wrote in a Tuesday Twitter thread, referring to these generative machine systems. “Most, if not all of these, will fail.” He also said, “Where generative AI will change the world is in narrow, mostly boring domains,” he continued. “VCs are ignoring this.”
According to Manidis, the potential for AI is being wasted on generative AI like text-to-image generators, AI-made artworks, etc. They might put Canva and Adobe out of business, but it doesn’t go anywhere from there. That being said, Manidis believes that AI will change the industry, but in more boring sectors like data entry, where AI will shine. “Billions of hours of human potential every year are wasted on menial tasks,” Mandis said. “Data entry, form filling, basic knowledge work, that kind of stuff,” he continued in the thread. “Large language models are uniquely good at these tasks.” “So while your favorite creator-economy VCs are funding new ways to generate dog pictures on your phone,” Manidis added, “there are billions of economic value to be generated by repurposing foundational models to solve basic data entry tasks.”
Although Will Mandis runs a very data-focused AI company, this is all convenient for him to say, but he raises some really interesting points. Whether he’s right or wrong, only time can tell.
