General-Purpose Vs. Special-Purpose AI

It seems already clear that both general-purpose artificial intelligence models as well as special-purpose AI models will have value. 

Special-purpose models are likely to shine for medical diagnosis, fraud detection, self-driving cars and robotics, for example. 

General-purpose models are likely to continue well enough for personalized assistants, customer service chatbots, content creation, market analysis and scientific discovery.

Special-purpose models for definable use cases will generally have the advantages of high accuracy, efficiency of resource usage and easier documentation of methodology and assumptions.

General-purpose models likely will continue to be more versatile, scalable and arguably more efficient for building some new apps that can use pre-trained models. 

The trade-offs might often include less accuracy for particular vertical (industry specific) or firm applications and might require higher computational resources than special-purpose models already optimized for a single firm, industry or use case. 

But even some who originally saw more promise in special-purpose models seem to be warming to general-purpose models as well. 

One indication of the foundational role of artificial intelligence comes from remarks made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on that firm’s most-recent earnings call. Zuckerberg says he has changed his mind about how and where to use AI, and the shift is from special purpose and siloed to general purpose. 

“One thing that became clearer to me in the last year is that this next generation of services requires building full general intelligence ,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, on the firm’s most-recent earnings call. “Previously I thought that because many of the tools were social, commerce, or maybe media-oriented that it might be possible to deliver these products by solving only a subset of AI's challenges.”

“But now it's clear that we’re going to need our models to be able to reason, plan, code, remember, and many other cognitive abilities in order to provide the best versions of the services that we envision,” he said.