Are we in an AI / ML bubble?

I doing high-end amateur photography and there are plenty of tools that are able to enhance (sharpen, noise reduction, color correction) imagery using AI that was not possible before.

I took AI/DL course before and professor demonstrated from scratch how to build an algo and train model capable of amazing upsampling of imagery.

Hence - bubble or not - there are lots of useful, practical benefits to this today.

AI is too big a term, Its like asking if there is a math bubble. AI is a lot of different disciplines.

There is likely a mis-prioritization of applications in the market.

You should look at bubbles in the context of applications, and perhaps dependent on strategy separately. Context ~ Health, AutoBI, NLP...; Strategy ~ unsupervised, explainable, deep, symbolic...

Another way to look at this is identifying Misery stocks. If the economy takes a hard dip, what will continue to be funded. Those are misery stocks. Some AI will survive misery at varying levels, others will not.

There are very few "AI companies". True AI companies are research labs like DeepMind and those AI consultancies. Both of these make money from PR and hype. Other than that, some video/image analysis and processing companies, e.g. face recognition solutions, come to mind as exceptions. The other kind of company that depends on the recent AI developments is infra. They are selling the "shovels" for others to buy into the hype.

Other companies that brand themselves as AI do so for PR purposes. Most of them don't use AI, use robust techniques that have been around for many decades, or use it only to justify their pitch. Their product would be just the same with rule-based systems or without any kind of ML.

Yes, because everyone is now 'An AI company' to woo investors, yet they don't contribute to AI research.

If this hype-cycle doesn't sound ridiculous, I've also heard that my local grocery store is using deep-learning + kubernetes to scale their supply chain systems. They told me that they're writing a Medium blog-post about this which is coming soon /s

No its just getting started, the world is still largely almost all unstructured data that needs to be structured

Yes, but this is to be expected. I think we are nearing the 'trough of disillutionment' in the Gartner hype cycle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

You need to have/generate meaningful data at significant scale to really be a company where AI can make a big difference.

Few companies build products that generate or interface with data at that level.