>I doubt we will talk a lot about AI in five years because AI will be an integral part of how people search for and interact with information. Or, if we talk about AI in five years, it will most likely refer to different technologies and solutions than what we denote as AI in 2024.
It's the latter. In 5 years, what we consider to be AI today will just be standard product features and the AI being discussed will be some new set of capabilities that are just being developed, and the same will happen 5 years after that.
AI as it's called today is an improvement over an existing thing, e.g. image generators, conversational interfaces, customer support automation, that kinda thing; that aspect of it won't go away, especially not if "good enough" becomes/stays affordable.
But whatever we have in five years will probably take over the "AI" moniker, like how ML had it ~10 years ago.
During the last AI winter, we relied on things like Bayesian filtering to categorize spam without a lot of ado, and it was a product of the previous AI surge.
Transformer based inference and generation are already useful, and there's no going back from that, even if the architecture will never get us artificial super intelligence.
It's the latter. In 5 years, what we consider to be AI today will just be standard product features and the AI being discussed will be some new set of capabilities that are just being developed, and the same will happen 5 years after that.