Murmurs are that the U.S. is heading towards a recession again. We have been running across such predictions since 2019. COVID did bring a slowdown, but that was entirely due to lockdowns and pandemic-related measures. My interpretation at this point is that even if there is a recession, it will not be a full-blown one. The purpose of the article, however, is not to guesstimate whether there will be a recession or not. This article will discuss why a recession can be an opportunity for technology companies that have a viable AI product at this point.

The genesis of this article was many different news articles intersecting in my mind, coupled with the fact that I forgot to charge my Osmo camera and hence could not record my “Deep Learning Fundamentals” episode. One of the articles was around Open AI, as shown below. It was actually an old article that shoehow ended up in my feed.

That made me think about the challenges of commercializing stand alone mega LLMs like ChatGPT. That is the primary reason I have been saying that OpenAI needs to explore commercial solutions beyond ChatGPT, flouting its expertise in developing industry-leading AI. My thoughts then transcended into how smaller, industry specific models have the commercial opportunity that collectively can surpass any amount ChatGPT can make.

Obviously other articles pertained to an impending recession. But how do these two articles intersect?

When I say that opportunities to leverage SMLs are immense, these opportunities originate from the challenges that organizations face at all three levels, strategic, operational, and tactical. And that is why I say that organizations that have viable, real AI products, can benefit from the recession.

When organizations start experiencing recession, many of the challenges that they have been experiencing across all three levels mentioned previously, become much more critical to address. At a broader level, an organization seeks to keep operating at the same service level, while minimizing the resources it leverages. Deep Learning based models, in tandem with small Generative AI models can help them do that in a way they could have never imagined during any previous recession.

So the gist is that if companies with products can highlight how their products can help organizations thwart the challenges that an incoming recession may present, they may end up making more money during recession, vs the other way around.