I guess it depends on what we mean by "AI winter". I completely agree that the current insane levels of investment aren't justified by the results, and when the market realises this it will overreact.
But at the same time there is a lot of value to capture here by building solid applications around the capabilities that already exist. It might be a winter more like the "winter" image recognition went through before multimodal LLMs than the previous AI winter
I think the upcoming AI bust will be similar to the 2000s dotcom bust - ecommerce was not a bad idea or a scam! And neither are transformers. But there are cultural similarities:
a) childish motivated reasoning led people to think a fairly simple technology could solve profoundly difficult business problems in the real world
b) a culture of "number goes up, that's just science"
c) uncritical tech journalists who weren't even corrupt, just bedazzled
In particular I don't think generative AI is like cryptocurrency, which was always stupid in theory, and in practice it has become the rat's nest of gangsters and fraudsters which 2009-era theory predicted. After the dust settles people will still be using LLMs and art generators.
I see the same way. My current strategy is what I think I should have done in the dotcom bubble: carefully avoid pigeonholing myself in the hype topics while learning the basics so I can set up well positioned teams after the dust settles.
But at the same time there is a lot of value to capture here by building solid applications around the capabilities that already exist. It might be a winter more like the "winter" image recognition went through before multimodal LLMs than the previous AI winter