The "Ai Ecosystem" has its flaws but this article seems to just provide a description of how it is now, and how they want it to be, without a path towards there.
I've found it very weird observing how CEOs across many companies behave as if they're part of some hivemind. When to do layoffs, how to implement office policies, and now pushing AI in the same way as if they have no brain of their own. It's very offputting. I can't tell if its collusion or whether maybe capitalism has its own goals that are pursued in lockstep by its creepy agents. I think the end goal is definitely to eliminate workers as much as they possibly can. And they think whoever can do that first will "win".
I’m not sure of the forum where they exchange and align on goals and approaches, it probably exists in some forms, but ultimately I think it’s CEO’s not wanting to be too far from the pack.
If you make the wrong call on one important thing and everyone else is right, your company is f_cked.
> yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality ... you'll basically only hear hype ...
This doesn't match my experience talking with people outside of tech, and as such, the whole essay feels like a straw man. There definitely are some people who drank the kool-aid, but they seem like a minority? I don't live in the Bay Area though.
I think this piece makes a fair and important point about LLM hype and the need to treat it as a normal technology rather than a cult movement. The over-the-top marketing and constant “AI will change everything” drumbeat can definitely obscures the more grounded, practical ways it can be used day-to-day.
That said, every major technology wave has needed a similar level of push, hype, and momentum to reach mass adoption. The Internet existed for decades before the public knew what to do with it. AOL gave such a huge push with the “You’ve got mail”, endless free trial CDs and an almost manic push to bring it into homes for it to become the foundation of modern life. The same was true of personal computers: early machines like the Apple II or IBM PC were expensive, clunky, and had little practical software. But without the evangelism, marketing, and cultural hype that surrounded them, the entire ecosystem might never have matured. So while the AI frenzy can feel excessive, some level of over-excitement may be what turns the technology from niche tools into something broadly accessible and transformative — just as it did for the web and the PC before it.
The hype is justified. Nowadays I rarely write code directly anymore. I don't have to navigate around the codebase to trace data flow. I don't have to find mistakes causing a deadlock. The way I do my job compared to a year ago is completely different and I'm accomplishing more in the same amount of time. This isn't even including my usage in my personal life for education.
I'm skeptical the majority of tech experts are struggling to find the utility of them.
> People worry that not being seen as mindless, uncritical AI cheerleaders will be a career-limiting move in the current environment of enforced conformity within tech
Yes. I am seeing this right now, but it's not just enough to join the chanting around the altar, you've got to be seen enthusiastically using AI as much as possible and it's turned the contributions of some of the most productive high level developers in my company into... ...well, slop.
I'm dealing with a bug from one such right now, where they wrote code that used my library, and it's not working for them, and they lack the understanding of their code to fix it, and the reason it's a bug I'm working on? Cursor couldn't fix it for them, and they lack the mental model to do so, because it's hard to mentally model code you didn't write.
I'm sure there's an inevitable "well, your company/colleague is doing it wrong then" critique incoming. And I agree.
But given that "doing it right" is often being defined as "using it as much as possible" by business leaders across the industry, then we get these paradoxical outcomes where doing so reduces productivity, but no-one is ready to admit that.
You've got to be AI-first, or AI-native, at least if you want the investors to stay invested.
I've never experienced such a collective adherence to tech hype (but probably only because my company couldn't figure out how to jam a blockchain and/or NFT in previously). Not even during the days when everyone was serverless, or "cloud-first" / "cloud-native".
It's wild.
TL;DR - we've always as an industry used appropriate tools for appropriate problems, right now it feels like so many of us are throwing AI slop at walls and seeing what sticks.
I feel like this is another case of an article kind of missing its own point. It says the majority view among tech experts is that AI is overhyped. And why does that matter? I guess because:
> If we were to simply listen to the smart voices of those who aren't lost in the hype cycle, we might see that it is not inevitable that AI systems use content without the consent of creators, and it is not impossible to build AI systems that respect commitments to environmental sustainability. We can build AI that isn't centralized under the control of a handful of giant companies. Or any other definition of "good AI" that people might aspire to.
So it's saying "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater"? We can have our cake and eat it too, we can have AI and also have it not be damaging? Except we can't. The article gives these two claims as reasons for other things but doesn't realize they are the reasons we can't:
> because the platforms that have introduced "AI" to the public imagination are run by authoritarian extremists with deeply destructive agendas.
> tech leaders are collaborating with the current regime to punish free speech, fire anyone who dissents, and embolden the wealthy tycoons at the top to make ever-more-extreme statements, often at the direct expense of some of their own workers.
This kind of thing to me is like saying we could make a really great machine gun that would be used just for peacfully shooting tin cans, if only we could get people to stop using such things to kill each other. Well we can't do that as long as the people who make the decisions about making such things want to make things that kill people instead of putting holes in tin cans. (Not the people who actually make the guns! The people who make the decisions.) And so this part doesn't matter:
> But it's important to remember that there are a lot more of us. ... Very few agree with the hype bubble that the tycoons have been trying to puff up.
But the tycoons still have the money and still call the shots, and that's why we're in the mess we're in. Neither the technical reality nor the majoritarian reality matters to the tycoons. The above quoted statement could apply equal well to all sorts of aspects of modern society --- social media, streaming services, telecom, political ads, gerrymandering, you name it. Most people don't like a lot of what we've got.
And the reason for that is that we're in a situation where what most people want doesn't matter. All that matters is what a small bunch of people with a lot of money wants. So this is off base:
> Once in a while, you might hear some coverage of the critiques of AI, but even those will generally be from people outside the tech industry, and they will often solely be about frustrations or anger with the negative externalities of the centralized Big AI companies. Those are valid and vital critiques, but [...]
No buts. Those are valid and vital techniques, so we can stop there (for now). The technical concerns are of secondary importance at best. The real issue is the concentration of wealth and power. If there were no Google, no OpenAI, no Meta, no Nvidia, no Amazon, and so on, there would be no one in a position to ignore the technical issues and instead spew pre-enshittified garbage out and call it AI. And then maybe people could get down to the business of using it in non-evil ways. But worrying about how many technical people think this or that is a distraction from the issue that it doesn't matter what anyone thinks except a small group of disproportionately powerful people.
A major part of the anti-social aspect of the AI hype is that it is profoundly anti-democratic.
Resource consumption—power, land, water—-are discussed as if we weren’t in the midst of a climate emergency that affects us all, nor are competing needs for those resources ever considered. The financing of those data centers is starting to look a lot like the derivative mess of ‘08. Companies are counting on receiving unwitting subsidies from regular power users. Etc. (Here in West Virginia, for example, we have lost our democratic right to regulate how local lands are used, so that we’re now powerless to stop land and water theft.) And if we ever dare to change this discourse we are told how important it is to “win the AI race with China!”, as if this were some real existential threat.
Meanwhile we’re expected to adopt a tech that, they tell us, will replace us. What’s not to like? /s
>What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a "normal technology"
Fair enough but in some ways it isn't. It works as a normal tech now but it has the possibility to become self improving, supercede human abilities and get on without us in a way that cars and toasters do not.
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[ 64.0 ms ] story [ 690 ms ] threadIf you make the wrong call on one important thing and everyone else is right, your company is f_cked.
This doesn't match my experience talking with people outside of tech, and as such, the whole essay feels like a straw man. There definitely are some people who drank the kool-aid, but they seem like a minority? I don't live in the Bay Area though.
That said, every major technology wave has needed a similar level of push, hype, and momentum to reach mass adoption. The Internet existed for decades before the public knew what to do with it. AOL gave such a huge push with the “You’ve got mail”, endless free trial CDs and an almost manic push to bring it into homes for it to become the foundation of modern life. The same was true of personal computers: early machines like the Apple II or IBM PC were expensive, clunky, and had little practical software. But without the evangelism, marketing, and cultural hype that surrounded them, the entire ecosystem might never have matured. So while the AI frenzy can feel excessive, some level of over-excitement may be what turns the technology from niche tools into something broadly accessible and transformative — just as it did for the web and the PC before it.
I'm skeptical the majority of tech experts are struggling to find the utility of them.
Yes. I am seeing this right now, but it's not just enough to join the chanting around the altar, you've got to be seen enthusiastically using AI as much as possible and it's turned the contributions of some of the most productive high level developers in my company into... ...well, slop.
I'm dealing with a bug from one such right now, where they wrote code that used my library, and it's not working for them, and they lack the understanding of their code to fix it, and the reason it's a bug I'm working on? Cursor couldn't fix it for them, and they lack the mental model to do so, because it's hard to mentally model code you didn't write.
I'm sure there's an inevitable "well, your company/colleague is doing it wrong then" critique incoming. And I agree.
But given that "doing it right" is often being defined as "using it as much as possible" by business leaders across the industry, then we get these paradoxical outcomes where doing so reduces productivity, but no-one is ready to admit that.
You've got to be AI-first, or AI-native, at least if you want the investors to stay invested.
I've never experienced such a collective adherence to tech hype (but probably only because my company couldn't figure out how to jam a blockchain and/or NFT in previously). Not even during the days when everyone was serverless, or "cloud-first" / "cloud-native".
It's wild.
TL;DR - we've always as an industry used appropriate tools for appropriate problems, right now it feels like so many of us are throwing AI slop at walls and seeing what sticks.
> If we were to simply listen to the smart voices of those who aren't lost in the hype cycle, we might see that it is not inevitable that AI systems use content without the consent of creators, and it is not impossible to build AI systems that respect commitments to environmental sustainability. We can build AI that isn't centralized under the control of a handful of giant companies. Or any other definition of "good AI" that people might aspire to.
So it's saying "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater"? We can have our cake and eat it too, we can have AI and also have it not be damaging? Except we can't. The article gives these two claims as reasons for other things but doesn't realize they are the reasons we can't:
> because the platforms that have introduced "AI" to the public imagination are run by authoritarian extremists with deeply destructive agendas.
> tech leaders are collaborating with the current regime to punish free speech, fire anyone who dissents, and embolden the wealthy tycoons at the top to make ever-more-extreme statements, often at the direct expense of some of their own workers.
This kind of thing to me is like saying we could make a really great machine gun that would be used just for peacfully shooting tin cans, if only we could get people to stop using such things to kill each other. Well we can't do that as long as the people who make the decisions about making such things want to make things that kill people instead of putting holes in tin cans. (Not the people who actually make the guns! The people who make the decisions.) And so this part doesn't matter:
> But it's important to remember that there are a lot more of us. ... Very few agree with the hype bubble that the tycoons have been trying to puff up.
But the tycoons still have the money and still call the shots, and that's why we're in the mess we're in. Neither the technical reality nor the majoritarian reality matters to the tycoons. The above quoted statement could apply equal well to all sorts of aspects of modern society --- social media, streaming services, telecom, political ads, gerrymandering, you name it. Most people don't like a lot of what we've got.
And the reason for that is that we're in a situation where what most people want doesn't matter. All that matters is what a small bunch of people with a lot of money wants. So this is off base:
> Once in a while, you might hear some coverage of the critiques of AI, but even those will generally be from people outside the tech industry, and they will often solely be about frustrations or anger with the negative externalities of the centralized Big AI companies. Those are valid and vital critiques, but [...]
No buts. Those are valid and vital techniques, so we can stop there (for now). The technical concerns are of secondary importance at best. The real issue is the concentration of wealth and power. If there were no Google, no OpenAI, no Meta, no Nvidia, no Amazon, and so on, there would be no one in a position to ignore the technical issues and instead spew pre-enshittified garbage out and call it AI. And then maybe people could get down to the business of using it in non-evil ways. But worrying about how many technical people think this or that is a distraction from the issue that it doesn't matter what anyone thinks except a small group of disproportionately powerful people.
Resource consumption—power, land, water—-are discussed as if we weren’t in the midst of a climate emergency that affects us all, nor are competing needs for those resources ever considered. The financing of those data centers is starting to look a lot like the derivative mess of ‘08. Companies are counting on receiving unwitting subsidies from regular power users. Etc. (Here in West Virginia, for example, we have lost our democratic right to regulate how local lands are used, so that we’re now powerless to stop land and water theft.) And if we ever dare to change this discourse we are told how important it is to “win the AI race with China!”, as if this were some real existential threat.
Meanwhile we’re expected to adopt a tech that, they tell us, will replace us. What’s not to like? /s
Fair enough but in some ways it isn't. It works as a normal tech now but it has the possibility to become self improving, supercede human abilities and get on without us in a way that cars and toasters do not.