Jeffrey Funk

Fellow, Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence
Jeffrey Funk is the winner of the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award and the author of six books including his most recent one: Unicorns, Hype and Bubbles: A Guide to Spotting, Avoiding and Exploiting Investment Bubbles In Tech.

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AI Productivity Hype: The New “Cargo Cult Science”?

Physicist Richard Feynman coined the term to describe imaginary scenarios for success based on simple misunderstanding of realities
The tech sector can push AI hype that resembles cargo cult science to its investors because of changes in media resulting from 30 years of the internet.

AI’s Contradictory Impact on Productivity: Squeezing a Balloon

AI appears to give support workers a big revolution in productivity. But it is somewhat like a child squeezing a balloon; the air pushes out someplace else
Individual workers may claim huge productivity gains for their work, ignoring the impact of AI on the work of downstream employees within the same process.

Why LLMs Are Not Boosting Productivity

If LLMs were as reliably useful as economist Tyler Cowen alleges, businesses would be using them to generate profits faster than LLMs generate text. They aren’t.
So far, AI is dragging down economic growth by diverting so much human talent and natural resources away from more productive uses.

Unequal Profits: Why AI Needs Successful Applications

Readers may be surprised to learn that these widely touted AI advances are not making their developers much money
In the short run this system is being propped up by the big tech players but for a stable future, it needs to be self-sustaining.

Do High AI Startup Valuations Mean Great Success, or Desperation?

The answer is important but is not as clear as we might think. First, let's look at the background
Consider a recent news report: “Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a deal that would value it at $60 billion, more than triple its valuation from a year ago” says the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic’s last venture capital (VC) funding round, less than two months ago, raised $2 billion, bringing its total funding to $9.6 billion. OpenAI had raised $6.6 billion, last October just a year after it raised $10 billion from Microsoft the previous year and just months after it also raised funds on the debt and secondary markets. So that $6.6 billion round was the largest VC funding round ever, a little larger than the $6 billion that Elon Musk’s generative AI startup, xAI, raised in 2023. It nearly doubled OpenAI’s valuation to $157 billion, and brought its

The Promise of Artificial General Intelligence is Evaporating

Revenue from corporate adoption of AI continues to disappoint and, so far, pales in comparison to the revenue that sustained the dot-com bubble — until it didn’t
Recognition is growing that fundamental challenges make LLMs unreliable. Increasingly expensive scaling will likely hasten the popping of the AI bubble.

AI Pessimists vs True Believers: A Deepening Divide

There is a growing divide about AI even among AI experts but many of them like polarizing content, just as the consumers of political information do
True believers don’t focus on short-term trends because they aren’t very positive. But short-term trends should be consistent with a long-term forecast.

No, the AI Bubble is Nothing Like the Dotcom Bubble

Don't listen to the tech bros on this one
Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers, said recently on LinkedIn: “The skepticism around AI’s ROI today feels a lot like the doubts people had about the internet in its early days. Back then, no one could fully grasp how much the web would transform our lives, and now AI is on the same path. Yes, it might be tough to measure immediate returns, but if history teaches us anything, it’s that game-changing technologies take time to show their true impact. By embracing AI, we’re not just adopting a tool — we’re investing in a future where human potential gets a major boost, and new opportunities are unlocked. Just like the internet became the foundation of our digital world, AI has the potential to do the same, when we approach it with the same optimism and

Musk and LeCun Have a Superficial Debate About Science

What would have been a better debate?
Elon Musk tweeted the following: “Join xAI if you believe in our mission of understanding the universe, which requires maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth, without regard to popularity or political correctness.” Yann LeCun, chief scientist at tech giant Meta, could not resist responding. Musk claims to “want a maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.” It escalated quickly, with Musk questioning what science LeCun had done in the past five years, and LeCun replying: “Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022. What about you?” LeCun then said: “If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not science”. So the most successful engineer over the last ten years criticizes academic

Hype Distracts AI Engineers from Real Work

Who is going to solve AI's actual problems?
One reason there wasn’t an emphasis on reducing hallucinations is because the problem is hard. Some argue that hallucinations are “baked into" AI chatbots.