Recently, the AI field presents a contradictory landscape: seemingly flourishing on the surface, but concealing underlying fatigue. Artificial intelligence appears to have reached a delicate juncture, with numerous tech giants and startups launching AI products, yet struggling to escape the predicament of homogenization.
The case of Character.ai reflects this point. As a star AI product, its reasoning request volume once reached one-fifth of Google's search traffic. However, according to reports, Character.ai has less than 100,000 subscribers, is cutting costs, and considering selling. AI social products generally face issues of heavy users consuming large resources and light users having poor retention, casting doubt on their commercial prospects.
This dilemma is not an isolated case. The entire AI industry seems to have fallen into a "decorative carving" predicament, overly focusing on surface feature stacking, struggling with fundamental breakthroughs, and innovation giving way to homogeneous feature tweaking.
Apple's introduction of Apple Intelligence attempts to make up for its lag in AI deployment, but the feature demonstration is lackluster. Microsoft's Copilot+ and the Recall tool in PCs also face privacy risk concerns. The release dates for OpenAI's Sora and GPT-4's voice mode remain uncertain, and SearchGPT contains elementary errors.
Startup teams are not immune either. AI search has become a new hotspot, but products are largely similar, lacking substantial innovation. Browser plugins proliferate, yet many are simple encapsulations of existing AI functions.
Looking back at the development of the previous wave of CV technology companies, we find they also never truly escaped the "decorative carving" predicament. Now, large language models seem to be repeating this history. Although technological breakthroughs have been achieved, commercial applications that create sustained value remain scarce.
To welcome the AI revolution, companies continue to invest heavily, but Wall Street has begun to reassess. Research reports from institutions like Goldman Sachs express doubts about AI's development prospects, warning of a long and questionable road ahead.
Does AI entering the decorative carving stage signal a repeat of the internet bubble? This question is worth pondering. The challenges facing the AI industry today are not just technical, but more about how to truly create value and achieve sustainable development.