The progress that has been made so far is already good enough to deliver tons of real business value. The tech is way ahead of application, as the tech has jumped forward so much in the last 5 years, and progress continues to be rapid.
I've direct evidence of that from my day job (building NLP chat bots for Intercom).
That business value will increase as we NLP progresses, even if we're moving towards a local optimum.
Even if we do get stuck, real products and real revenue powered by NLP will help fund research on successive generations.
Of course theres tons of hype about AI. But theres also a big virtuous cycle which just wasn't present in the setup which created previous AI winters.
I've direct evidence of that from my day job (building NLP chat bots for Intercom).
That business value will increase as we NLP progresses, even if we're moving towards a local optimum.
Even if we do get stuck, real products and real revenue powered by NLP will help fund research on successive generations.
Of course theres tons of hype about AI. But theres also a big virtuous cycle which just wasn't present in the setup which created previous AI winters.