Ask HN: Was tech always so scammy?
I doubt I'm alone in feeling that several of the recent big hype cycles in tech, crypto, nfts, metaverse, now large language models and chat style AIs have all had a certain "snake oil" salesmenesque quality to them. That's not to discredit the underlying achievements and benefits these technologies could bring, but it really does feel like we've experienced a few recent waves of technological mania in which contingents of people have overpromised, overfit, and underdelivered. The discourse around these technologies is quite hyperbolic and free of the more rational, reserved expectations and reasoned discussion I might expect to find around technological developments. Companies seem to be rushing to shove chat AIs into absolutely everything, even where it doesn't make much sense, just to get a blog post out at the detriment of their products. It feels like we're in a sort of gold rush wherein most of the gold is of the fool's variety.
Is this a recent thing, or am I simply not remembering similar vaporware hypestorms of the past?
86 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadStarting somewhere around the 90s and ever since, they desperately need to pull a rabbit every few years to prop up the stocks.
In one sense, sure, 90's is the present (consumer tech has been around for let's say 50 years), but in the context of computers the 90;s is the distant past.
Personal computers (as in one's regular people could buy) become available (more or less) during the 70's. By the 80's things like Apple 2, Commodore, Spectrum etc are "main stream" - in the sense that "some people had them". But "some people" was a tiny minority. When I was at school most people didn't have them. Businesses were just getting going with them.
The 90's (windows 3.1) makes them a bit more accessible, but still "rare". Windows 95 brings PC's (and the internet) "to the masses", but most homes still don't have them. Adoption has picked up though - lots of internet hype, FOMO and so on.
More or less at this point the hype machines build up. There's always been over-hype, but up to this point it's limited to those geeks who read Byte or PC Magazine. Now it's gone "full consumer". Dot Com (bubble) ensues. There are fortunes to be made by those in the right place, at the right time, with the right product. But there's also a lot of weird. (pets.com et al).
The hype-machine has never stopped. New languages (Java), Touch-phones, tablets, facebook, farmville (remember farmville?). We still recognized the survivors, but the failures quickly fade. Alta Vista? Dare I say, Yahoo? AOL? Compuserve? Geocities? 3DTV?
So, to answer the question, sure, "scammy" hype has been with us, certainly since tech went mainstream. Everyone has the next great idea. Some stick around more than others.
AI is having a moment in the sun. It's a new shiny toy at Christmas. Whether it has staying power - I don't know. But sooner or later it'll fade, and the next big thing will come along.
As a side note, well, if you're like max 30-ish, it might be.
If you're like 40-50, 90s is within livable memory, and has been formative in later developments. It's not like it's some ancient history where it's no longer relevant. In IT terms that might be, say Algol (where it's only an influencial ancestor, but no longer used or relevant itself) or Bell Labs (which is only something that used to be a major innovation hub but hasn't been since forever).
When it comes to the 90s, many of the active players (from Microsoft and Apple, to Oracle and Amazon), many tech moves and events of the era, and of course tons of technologies developed then (from the Web to Java and Linux) are very active still.
>More or less at this point the hype machines build up. There's always been over-hype, but up to this point it's limited to those geeks who read Byte or PC Magazine. Now it's gone "full consumer".
That's true. But I also think the hype aimed at geeks and developers has also been magnified by an order of magnitude or two in snake-oility.
It's not actually a sustainable profit if you have to out-innovate and out-execute every competitor, every release cycle, or you lose all of it immediately. It kind of explains why the industry converged around monopolies on the one hand and hyper-growth with quick exits on the other.
If there actually was a pill that would actually make your penis bigger, would it:
A) be advertised only on the high number cable channels late at night?
or
B) Be shouted from the rooftops?
So, develop a healthy sense of skepticism about everything you see on the media. It's nothing new.
(1) Big Tech in the U.S. is like the way the car industry was in the 1970s in the U.S. Still thinking it is the best of the world and many onlookers agreeing but deeply rotten inside.
Facebook and Google, for instance, are still riding high on monopolies in two sided markets. Advertisers have nowhere to go because the audience is there, but without revenue from advertisers, new publishers and social media can't fund efforts that would get them an audience.
Amazon, Netflix, and Uber on the other hand look "successful" because they are overcapitalized and able to lose money on all or some of their product lines. You'd have an easy time selling half-priced taxi rides too if you had $25 billion of investor's money to spend.
The real innovation in e-Commerce and social media is happening in India and China because the markets aren't locked up tight by monopolists there, that's the real story behind Tik Tok. AMZN was a leader in e-commerce 25 years ago but... That was 25 years ago and that is how you say "Sears and Roebucks" in Internet time!
(2) Crypto and NFT are obviously an effort to move money from one pocket to another without any value being created or transferred, not much more to say there except...
(3) Facebook has been chasing the virtual reality dream for quite some time, you might recall there was an AR scam being pushed by "Magic Leap" in the last decade and Hololens was a thing too, the Army even was talking about buying a Hololens for each and every soldier until they discovered that soldiers couldn't shoot straight while wearing one.
Last year though, Facebook got universally panned when they linked their successful efforts in VR Hardware to their unsuccessful efforts in VR Software (Hint: Horizon Worlds isn't fun, it's like a summer camp where you're expected to entertain itself) and with the NFT moment. It was a big mistake. See the following for a good analysis of why "the metaverse" is doomed as it is conceptualized:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q
(4) Eliezer Yudkowsky is up in arms about ChatGPT because ChatGPT is superhuman at bullshitting and can bullshit better than he can! People who were hoping they could get rich without trying with NFTs now think ChatGPT can write their pitch deck. Medium.com is in crisis because the kind of person who was too lazy to maintain or promote a blog was always too lazy to write a blog.
What I'll say is this though. NLP stuff that was beyond state of the art at a startup I was working at 5 years ago is now easy, and if you look here
https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour
you'll see 13 uses of transformers listed and prompt-driven text generation is just 1 of them. Seduced by ChatGPT's bullshitting capabilities people will be amazed at the 70% accuracy of GPT-3, the 75% accuracy of GPT-4, the 77% accuracy of GPT-5, the 78% accuracy of GPT-6. People who learn how these models actually work how to train them on specific tasks will (a) run them on their own computers under their own control, (b) run models orders of magnitude smaller, (c) get 95%+ accuracy on well-specified problems with modest amounts of data, (d) have access to much better models 6 months from now.
I've been using ChatGPT for the last week or two and it's not got a single coding question I've asked it right. Seems alright as a 'rubber duck' for generating ideas and seems okish for creative writing but for not a hell of a lot else at the minute.
The visual AI art stuff does seem worth the hype though but yeah, I'm feeling burnt out on this shit too. Based on everyone I speak to, I think the majority of people are. The pandemic probably didn't help.
One thing to note is that ChatGPT is still GPT-3.5 sometimes. Their page says it is GPT-4 if capacity is available, but I suspect GPT-4 might be pretty busy right now. You can pay $20/mo for GPT-4, which I am close to doing just to try it more.
But from what I have heard, GPT-4 is going to be better at answering those coding questions, and plenty of people here are paying for that, so this might explain why you are underwhelmed and other people are enthusiastic. I was pretty dismissive of this stuff, recently tweeting that ChatGPT made for a poor rubber duck, but my friend has convinced me to pay a little more attention, and now I am seeing some of the value people are talking about.
The two main Unreal demos for anyone interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj60HHy-Kqk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnaKyc3mQVk
I mean the level of detail is amazing but there's still the question of how much value does it add to the game in the end. And: how good does MetaHuman, impressive as it is, need to get to escape the Uncanny Valley? Or does it ever?
I suspect most on this site prefer skimable text content. I personally hate videos
https://youtube.com/watch?v=s6j-2vrGkc0
It feels like a narrow general intelligence with a lot of knowledge. Narrow in the sense that it is only text based, but general in the sense that it did very well handling these complex questions. It felt like an expert in all the random little things I have personally been focused on in my philosophical journey.
I've just watched the first Unreal demo. What's funny is I grew up in the redwoods, before the drought at a time when it was considered a temperate rainforest. As I have gotten older I've had to move a little farther from the redwoods, and I feel like I have left a piece of me there. I have always been interested in video game experiences which reproduce the feeling of being in the forest. Recently I got a VR headset and have been having conversations with my friends about how much I'd like to create more accurate forest environments so I can feel like I am there even when I'm not able to get out there.
So I am an ideal audience to appreciate these video game engine demos. And they look nice! But GPT-4 is much more significant to me. It is providing me detailed feedback and advice on how I can manage my career and my life in ways which are really energizing. When I write scripts for my youtube videos, I know I will be able to ask it for specific advice on topics to consider, or parts of it which I might be able to improve. I am not going to do what some high school students do and have it do all of my writing for me, as my personal voice and expression matters a lot to me. But what I will do is share with it my writing and ask for feedback based on my ideals and goals. It can serve as a teacher providing feedback on my work.
That is much, much more valuable to me than an improved video game engine. This is going to be an ally in my career and help me feel as though I don't have to do all the thinking alone.
The hype originates in the business comminity, and it's about all the money that will be made, not technology.
The technology part is over as far as business is concerned. It's good enough to get everyone in the world to type their every need into this textbox rather than another. Everything else is downstream from there.
Transformers, rotators, discombulators, those things get nerds excited, but what's whipping people into a frenzy is the race to GOOG 2.0
I think at the same time you're ignoring the deep problems that are affecting google right now. Google makes their money on ads, and AI could deeply effect that market causing them drastic profitability drops.
Doesn't matter what you can make, companies don't cut their own throat in the short term, even if it will kill them in the long term.
But at the same time, people are flipping out because it is, well, machine learning. I was following AI, mostly as a hobby interest, though I did some undergrad courses, before it got all buzz-wordy. Just ten, even five years ago, some of the stuff being demonstrated, were the sort of thing I thought would take many decades to develop, and that I may not see in my lifetime. Speech recognition, machine translation, machine vision, for example.
For more than half a century, good machine translation and speech recognition were the holy grail of AI. An incredible amount of work went into them. Specialized systems, grammars and parsers, programmed general knowledge databases. Collecting and correlating enormous aligned bilingual text corpuses with phonetic annotation. After several decades of such work, it got us to mediocre-quality Google Translate style services that were the norm until recently.
Now, without any of that specialized work, with a much more general learning algorithm, there are translation systems that are superior to anything humans designed to specifically be machine translators. It just falls out accidentally from the large language models -- they can also, incidentally, translate, and do better than anything specifically designed to translate ever did.
Is this true or is there just a massive gulf in application at the moment?
For one trivial example take something like indexing historical newspapers that you would really expect to be in the class of “solved problems” because it’s largely typeset, but the commercial offerings [1,2,3] are just chock full of errors and there is absolutely nothing I can apply off the shelf that gets better results without a ton of extra effort and compute.
1. Newspapers.com 2. Newspaperarchive.com 3. Genealogybank.com
It is only true if you drink the cool aid.
Speech recognition - Siri still have major issues undestanding me. Youtube text2speech routinely mistranscribes because it simply have no understanding of the language.
Machine translation is hilarious at best and dangerously wrong at worst.
Machine vision still could not spot the difference between pastry and furry animals last time I checked.
All of these are examples of non-working over hyped tech. It is not a list of "basically" solved problems.
DeepL is actually really good a lot of the time.
When was the last time you checked the status of machine vision, because the problem you suggested is not hard for it anymore.
A real human transcriber still outperforms any automated system in existence.
My company performed extensive accuracy testing and lets people choose to use a human transcriber if they want. Most people are perfectly happy to use the machine transcription. You are just seem bitter. Did an AI steal your wife?
Machine translation still makes a few mistakes but hardly more than a human.
Machine vision: I worked on a factory where a machine would approve/reject products passing through at a ridiculously high speed, and it never got one wrong. This was 15 years ago.
Your experience is completely the opposite of mine.
Isn’t text2speech the opposite of transcribing?
Speech2text would be transcribing, and text2speech would be speech synthesis.
Anyway, assuming you meant speech2text: I found YouTube‘s transcribing quite good. It even understands stuff that is inaudible to me (especially in movie snippets). Of course it’s not perfect, but neither am I.
I picked a random passage from a novel in French I am currently reading. ChatGPT translated the three paragraphs I ran it on correctly; there are no major quibbles to be had. It is good, coherent English, a correct translation, which closely follows the French original, even capturing some of the poetic imagery effectively.
I'm sure after another paragraph or two there will be a weird screw-up. And there's no consistency in a running translation of any length. Etc. Yes, it's not perfect. Not fully human-equivalent.
Still. I remember when machine translation like I just did was the realm of science fiction. And I thought it would remain science fiction for a long time. The fact that such a thing isn't mind-blowing shows how far things have come, hasn't it?
> Speech recognition - Siri still have major issues undestanding me.
I am using speech-to-text AI transcription every day. It's been revolutionary for me. I am hard of hearing. The cutting edge is Whisper, and it is leaps and bounds over the state-of-the-art just a year ago: https://github.com/openai/whisper
Have you tried OpenAI Whisper, especially with its "large" model? Siri and Youtube shouldn't be the yard sticks to judge the entire field, they both have unique hardware constraints and they're far from the state of the art.
Siri isn't even the latest models that have a much lower error rate.
Epic shows incredible looking demos periodically, but you don't get to see games that actually look like that until a decade+ later.
Have you used common prompting techniques like CoT and self-reflection?
It wouldn’t even bother me if it was just normal hype, but it’s the “omz this is going by to usher in a utopia that just happens to be like my favorite sci fi book” crap
That's a bit like complaining in the late 90s that a lot of the articles were about the internet taking off.
I think maybe it's a little overhyped. I suspect that some of the incredible performance of GPT4 is down to good engineering and is going to be less impressive when used for bigger real world problems, and it won't improve as fast as some people on here think it will.
However, it's clearly a quantum leap* in technical progress. It's likely going to change the world as much or more than the widespread adoption of the internet, and in a shorter timeframe. And it is fascinating to many of us.
*in the colloquial sense of the term. A gigantic and sudden advance.
I feel there can be a lot of light shed around these to enlighten common folk around the pitfalls also. But such is the nature of this tech at this point. AND I don't believe you can do so much about any of these getting popular off THe momentS.
It may seem like that, but it's neither ok nor even okish in reality. Whatever time you save on not writing, you'll lose double that editing, and the end result will be average at best. Of course, average is still better than a sizeable chunk of human population is capable of producing, and sometimes it's enough. For anything of higher quality, it's hard to take it seriously. You can use it as a thesaurus or a dictionary in a bind, or for estimating how your text will be understood by less well-read readers. For creative, but factual writing it's even worse - you never know if it started hallucinating already or will in a moment. I'm not saying it's not useful - in specific circumstances it can be, but the utility for creative writing is, IMO, marginal.
Disclaimer: I'm not a professional writer, but an avid reader and a bit of a blogger. I'd love to be wrong on this and corrected by a real writer - especially if they can share in what way they use ChatGPT that's worth it :)
Back in the day, I got all of my gaming news out of a physical magazine. That means people with a hyped-up scammy product had no way of reaching me unless they could convince the writer at that magazine that they were legit.
Nowadays, all of the grifters can email me directly and/or create SEO-optimized websites and/or pay Google/Facebook to shove ads into my face.
The democratization of communication has made scams much more annoying.
No.
Yes
I do not feel that way about GPT-4-level AI. I am continually blown away by the value I get when I use it. I ask it programming questions, and while it doesn't always get things 100% right, it saves me a ton of time. I've asked it medical questions (I used the prompt suggested by this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35319988), and it was invaluable. I even showed the chat to my doctor, and while I could tell at the beginning she was feeling a bit "Oh lord, I thought it was bad with 'Dr Google', now it's going to be much worse", but by the end of it I felt she was even a bit shaken by how good the responses were.
I totally agree there is a ton of snake-oil with respect to "BS AI" pitches, and it seems like there are lots of companies calling everything under the sun "AI". But that doesn't mean there isn't "real" AI, and GPT-4 has been the most mind-blowing piece of technology I've ever used.
And before that, there was a tail of previous AI hype cycle. I remember training an actual neural network on IBM PC 80286, as our school competition project, back in 1992.
And before that, the minicomputers boom, but I’m not old enough to remember it. VAXen and Usenet, this sort of thing.
Hype cycles are the natural state of affairs in tech.
Lots of things fit this unless you want to be insanely cynical and reductive. You can always construct some conspiracy theory about how say, someone working for Debian or at say the EFF is really, secretly, trying to pad their resume and, even if they don't admit it, chase after wealth with some future lucrative payout, but people in practical terms, have different motives. Some people work on say, astronomical data, because they want to work on astronomical data. They like having a roof over their head, but they're not looking for it to be made with gold.
Choose what you work on wisely with caution and discretion. If you want a yacht and a bugatti, go for it, have fun. But if you don't, then, really, just don't.
That said, take a look at the Gartner hype cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle The same game has been playing out across varying contexts over a long time. This is nothing specific to "tech" -- "tech" just happens to be a brand with positive connotations, for today.
For a deeper take on the dynamics of the evolution of a new social trend, see https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths Once tech became "cool", the scene would inevitably expand beyond the "geeks" to attract people would would want to exploit it selfishly.
ETA: OP specifically mentions "tech" - so the first appearance of consumer tech is in the 1920s (cars, radios, etc.), a decade which was, in fact, characterised by Ponzi-esque overleveraged speculative investing. In reality, this wasn't investing only in tech specifically, but a massive spike in consumer tech purchasing was one of the key signals for investors at the time. This ended with the now very famous Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression.
Android flashlight apps, Facebook personality quizzes, Amazon affiliate spam, drop shipping, pay-to-win games. The shining, prestigious "platforms" are necessarily in symbiosis with their ecosystems of (mostly) slimy, bottom-feeding tenants.
Rails discourse, NodeJS discourse, MongoDB discourse, AWS discourse, Docker discourse, Agile discourse, TDD discourse, etc. Tech has always had cycles of hype, counter-hype, disillusionment, and eventually sorting tools and approaches into their proper niches in view of tradeoffs.
SEO, growth hacking, Bangladeshi click farms,
Silicon Valley boosterism, idea guys with no charm,
Patent trolling, due diligence leaks,
Sharks lurking, waiting for the opportunity to sneak.
Android flashlights, Facebook quizzes galore,
Pay-to-win games, Amazon affiliates who always want more,
But these slimy tenants sustain the prestigious platforms we see,
It's a cycle of hype, disillusionment, and finding niches uniquely.
Rails discourse and NodeJS chatter,
AWS and MongoDB, Agile and TDD, they all matter,
Tech's economic success always attracts the wannabes,
But eventually everything falls into their proper niche and degree.
So next time you're scrolling through the latest tech news,
Remember the hype can be misleading, and always consider your dues,
Take a moment to reflect on the balance of tradeoffs and gain,
Tech is a dynamic industry that always evolves again and again.
This is probably too optimistic. I think there's a lot of success, failure, and even assignment of particular technologies to particular niches that is not about inherent tradeoffs as much as the incidental history of various power struggles in institutions, governments, and marketplaces.
There's not really any guarantee that the sorting we get 'in the end' reflects the fundamental tradeoffs of the technologies.
(Love the comment overall, though, and mostly agree!)
Same with many chemical discoveries in the 1800s, and with nuclear discoveries in the 1950s.
The snake oil salesmen will always race to some new tech to try and make a quick buck. Partially because the new tech actually does do some interesting things and partially because it's new enough no one can call them on it quite yet.
Even now there are tons of new science and tech in other fields that the general public are more convinced than ever work for health, etc. And at best are hopeful thinking and at worst are massive scams which are straight out hurting millions.
It is really difficult to suss out the winners and losers are going to be. VCs take the approach of spreading across as many bets as possible - hoping to get lucky. Companies will try to add the next big thing to their existing products to stay relevant (purely defensive maneuvers). Employees looking for jobs in the gold rush must either _really_ believe in the product/company they're working on or have the ability to move quickly off a sinking ship.
Tl;Dr it's always like this. Also it's not purely a bad thing - try to find ways to be positive.
Just look at the huge number of failed game controllers that will "revolutionize" gaming,... or try watching an old computer show (eg. computer chronicles) where they are trying to hype and sell some "new, revolutionary" tech, that "everyone will use in a few years"...
That said, humans do have a tendency to romanticise the past - forgetting the bad and the weird.
Back then, the internet was made of people with intent. I remember the first time I rode a train where two passengers next to me read out a URL for a local newspaper and how it was going to change their world. Before that, I don't think I actually heard someone spell out "w, w, w, yes 3 of them, dot..."
Since then, the web industry has gain tremendous growth, roles were created. Roles that frankly, don't need to exist.
Let me remind you of SEO experts, Crypto bros, Cybersec "one click security guys" that don't understand TCP, reverse proxying, NAT, incapable of knowing which IP range is on the VPN, but are fully qualified...
Recruiters since forever, 8 front-end developers for 1 SPA, one dude dedicated to the build system! AI prompters are around the corners...
A cyber security team operating "WAF" - the idea that we are so far gone from knowing what runs on our own servers that we need to firewall them.
30X slower code because it's abstracted by virtual pods, running in virtual machines, operating virtual cpus...
Social media experts: FML!
Social medias have given every village idiots a loud planetary voice. Search is seen as the true north, fuelled by echo chambers and agendas. Linkedin is a dystopian nightmare.
There is definitely a bubble, and it has blown so far out of proportions we can't even see the surface anymore! If you're one of the guys that call BS on any of it, you're being isolated as a mad man. But, just, look around.
It's okay though, AI generated content will destroy what is left of the internet of information. Village idiots will now have not only a planet wide reach, but they will also write like nobel laureates!
Let’s take a bridge as a comparison. It’s also technical but it’s understood very well and there not much variability. A bridge doesn’t serve too many purposes. Mainly to allow heavy objects to move across something.
Software on the other hand is complex. Rather simple applications can have many purposes and even more internal execution paths. Sure, we need to develop a software just once. So all the engineers concentrate on a single thing, whereas we need many civil engineers to build and maintain the bridges. Apparently, it still doesn’t work.
Usually for software, there is no liability. Imagine civil engineers building bridges like software engineers. Maybe they would all look different and fancy and we would run around to take nice pictures of them. Also they would break down much more and people would just expect it and live with that.