The winters are the best part, economic harm aside.

Winters are when technology falls out of the vice grip of Capital and into the hands of the everyman.

Winters are when you’ll see folks abandon this AIaaS model for every conceivable use case, and start shifting processing power back to the end user.

Winters ensure only the strongest survive into the next Spring. They’re consequences for hubris (“LLMs will replace all the jobs”) that give space for new things to emerge.

So, yeah, I’m looking forward to another AI winter, because that’s when we finally see what does and does not work. My personal guess is that agents and programming-assistants will be more tightly integrated into some local IDEs instead of pricey software subscriptions, foundational models won’t be trained nearly as often, and some accessibility interfaces will see improvement from the language processing capabilities of LLMs (real-time translation, as an example, or speech-to-action).

That, I’m looking forward to. AI in the hands of the common man, not locked behind subscription paywalls, advertising slop, or VC Capital.