Sometimes AI hype can be so silly that it distracts us from the important work of making it functional. For example, you can read Bill Gates’ paean to AI and believe that within the next five years, “You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do.” Of course! And maybe you’ll issue those commands while sitting in one of Elon Musk’s fully autonomous self-driving cars that he’s been promising forever (well, for 10 years, to be fair).
In our rush to hype the AI future, we risk setting unrealistic expectations that can have a dampening impact on investment, particularly in areas of security. Even if we reach Bill Gates’ utopia, it will feel more like a dystopia if we can’t fix things like prompt injection for large language models (LLMs).
