AI Winter Is Coming
Sep 20, 2024 • Han Lee | 3 min read (623 words)
This principle extends beyond corporate life and into the world of AI. Personally, I address the first group producers and the second group promoters. And in the current AI ecosystem, we’re seeing far more promoters than producers — sometimes promoters disguised as producers. This phenomenon starts at the source: academia.
Academia is becoming a paper mill, driven by the pressure to “publish or perish.” Many students and researchers are scrambling to catch the AI wave, not only for top-tier lab positions but also for immigration advantages (hello O-1 visas). This pressure has led to a flood of papers with catchy titles like “* is All You Need” or “[X] RAG”, hoping to attract enough attention from audiences, both academic and industry. Even just with RAG, there are at least 12 variations.
But beneath the surface, there are rampant issues: citation rings, reproducibility crises, and even outright cheating. Just look at the Stanford students who claimed to fine-tune LLaMA3 to have be multimodal with vision at the level of GPT-4v, only to be exposed for faking their results. This incident is just the tip of the iceberg, with arXiv increasingly resembling BuzzFeed more than a serious academic repository.
