Tech customers are massively AI hype fatigued at this point.
The tech isn’t going away, but a hard reset is overdue to bring things back down for a cold hard reality check. Article yesterday about MSFT slashing quotas on AI sales as customers aren’t buying is in line with this broader theme.
Morgan Stanley also quietly trying to offload its exposure to data center financing in a move that smells very summer of 2008-ish. CNBC now talks about the AI bubble multiple times a day. OpenAI looks incredibly vulnerable and financially over-extended.
I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point.
A lot of this AI backlash feels less about the tech itself and more about people feeling economically exposed. When you think your job or livelihood is on thin ice, it is easier to direct that fear at AI than at the fact that our elected reps have not offered any real plan for how workers are supposed to survive the transition.
AI becomes a stand-in for a bigger problem. We keep arguing about models and chatbots, but the real issue is that the economic safety net has not been updated in decades. Until that changes, people will keep treating AI as the thing to be angry at instead of the system that leaves them vulnerable.
The recent increase of hardware prices (the example I gave yesterday
of the same RAM I purchased about 2 years ago for a cheap computer,
suddenly costing 2.5x as much as it did ~2 years ago) changed my opinion completely. I was already
skeptical of AI, but I could see a few possible use cases, such as
generating images for use in free-to-play browser games, and so forth.
But I also saw a lot of crap - fake-videos on youtube that just wastes
my time. And now that the prices are going up, I have enough indeed.
The big tech bro AI mega-corporations need to pay us - aka mankind -
for the damage they cause here. The AI bubble is already subsiding,
we see that, despite Trump trying to protect the mafiosi here. They
owe us billions now in damage. Microsoft also recently announced it
will milk everyone by increasing the prices due to "new AI features
in MS office". Granted, I don't use Microsoft products as such (I do
have a computer running Win10 though, so my statement is not 100%
correct; I just don't use a Microsoft paid-for office suite or any
other milk-for-money service), but I think it is time to turn the odds.
These corporations should pay us, for the damage they are causing here
in general. I no longer accept the AI mafia method, even less so as
the prices of hardware went up because of this. This mafia owes us
money.
At one side, people are unhappy about AI, at the other side, who of those same people will stop using ChatGPT to write their work e-mails and assignments for them.
It looks like the "car problem" in yet another form. Many people will agree that our cities have become too car-centric and that cars take way too much public space, but few will give up their own personal car.
> The friction isn’t just about quality—it’s about what the ubiquity of these tools signals.
Unless they are being ironic, using an AI accent with a statement like that for an article talking about the backlash to lazy AI use is an interesting choice.
It could have been human written (I have noticed that people that use them all the time start to talk like them), but the "its not just x — its y" format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written / edited by AI.
There is nothing called deep value. Stock market rises on speculation of other people's buying patterns, not company fundamentals.
Where are deep values? Politics? media? academia? human relations? business? What do you mean by deep values? We can't even look beyond one year ahead.
Modern human behavior is highly optimized, to bother only about immediate goals. The other day, I was reviewing a software architecture and asked the architect who the audience/consumer for this document is. She said it is the reviewers. I asked again hoping to identify the downstream process that uses this document, and got the same answer, a bit sternly this time.
This is AI's "dialup era" (pre-56k, maybe even the 2400 baud era).
We've got a bunch of models, but they don't fit into many products.
Companies and leadership were told to "adopt AI" and given crude tools with no instructions. Of course it failed.
Chat is an interesting UX, but it's primitive. We need better ways to connect domains, especially multi-dimensional ones.
Most products are "bolting on" AI. There are few products that really "get it". Adobe is one of the only companies I've seen with actually compelling AI + interface results, and even their experiments are just early demos [1-4]. (I've built open source versions of most of these.)
We're in for another 5 years of figuring this out. And we don't need monolithic AI models via APIs. We need access to the AI building blocks and sub networks so we can adapt and fine tune models to the actual control surfaces. That's when the real take off will happen.
Periodic reminder that Newsweek no longer exists. What you're reading is essentially an SEO play run by a religious cult that bought Newsweek's branding in a fire sale. A useful thing to do with any Newsweek story is to take a minute to look into the background of whoever the author of the story is.
Notably, this story is pitched as a "News Story", but it's not really that at all; it's an opinion piece with a couple of quotes from AI opponents. Frustratingly, not many people understand what "Newsweek" is today, so they're always going to be able to collect some quotes for whatever story they're running.
It’s not a backlash on the AI it’s a backlash on the society that is utilizing it
Go and read all of the anti-AI articles and they will eventually boil down to something to the effect of:
“the problems we have are more foundational and fundamental and AI looks like a distraction”
However this is a directionless complaint that falls under the “complaining about technology“ trope
As a result there is no real coherent conversation about what AI is how do we define it what are people actually complaining about what are we rallying against because people are overwhelmingly utilizing it in every part of life
I believe that the root cause for the "fatigue" and tension around AI is much more embedded in the societal context.
US (and the rest of the western world) citizens face real life problems in youth employment, social/political instability, unaffordable housing, internet addiction (yes, I believe that it is real problem that people spend 5 hours on their phones daily) and social atomisation. Meanwhile all resources are put in a rush into building technology that does not fundamentally improve people's well being. Advanced societies have had pretty good capabilities of doing writing, design, coding, searching information, etc. Now we are pouring all available resources, at any cost, to automate these processes even more. The costs of this operation are tremendous and it doesn't yield any results that improve everyday lives.
In 2020 there was a ton of UI/UX/graphics companies that could produce copious amount of visual content for the society while providing work to many people. Now we are about to automate this process and be able to generate infinite amount of graphics on demand. To what end? Were our capabilities to create graphics any kind of bottleneck before? I don't think so.
The stock market and tech leadership are completely decoupled from the problems that the majority of people faces. The real effect of AI at hand is to commoditise intellectual work that previously functioned well dispersed in society. This does not bring benefit to the majority of people.
> a Pew Research center survey found that nearly one in five Americans saw AI as a benefit rather than a threat. But by 2025, 43 percent of U.S. adults now believe AI is more likely to harm them than help them in the future, according to Pew.
Am I stupid or is this a stupid line that proves the antithesis of what they want? It went from 4 in 5 being negative to less than half?
20 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 40.5 ms ] threadThe tech isn’t going away, but a hard reset is overdue to bring things back down for a cold hard reality check. Article yesterday about MSFT slashing quotas on AI sales as customers aren’t buying is in line with this broader theme.
Morgan Stanley also quietly trying to offload its exposure to data center financing in a move that smells very summer of 2008-ish. CNBC now talks about the AI bubble multiple times a day. OpenAI looks incredibly vulnerable and financially over-extended.
I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point.
AI becomes a stand-in for a bigger problem. We keep arguing about models and chatbots, but the real issue is that the economic safety net has not been updated in decades. Until that changes, people will keep treating AI as the thing to be angry at instead of the system that leaves them vulnerable.
The big tech bro AI mega-corporations need to pay us - aka mankind - for the damage they cause here. The AI bubble is already subsiding, we see that, despite Trump trying to protect the mafiosi here. They owe us billions now in damage. Microsoft also recently announced it will milk everyone by increasing the prices due to "new AI features in MS office". Granted, I don't use Microsoft products as such (I do have a computer running Win10 though, so my statement is not 100% correct; I just don't use a Microsoft paid-for office suite or any other milk-for-money service), but I think it is time to turn the odds.
These corporations should pay us, for the damage they are causing here in general. I no longer accept the AI mafia method, even less so as the prices of hardware went up because of this. This mafia owes us money.
It looks like the "car problem" in yet another form. Many people will agree that our cities have become too car-centric and that cars take way too much public space, but few will give up their own personal car.
Unless they are being ironic, using an AI accent with a statement like that for an article talking about the backlash to lazy AI use is an interesting choice.
It could have been human written (I have noticed that people that use them all the time start to talk like them), but the "its not just x — its y" format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written / edited by AI.
There is nothing called deep value. Stock market rises on speculation of other people's buying patterns, not company fundamentals.
Where are deep values? Politics? media? academia? human relations? business? What do you mean by deep values? We can't even look beyond one year ahead.
Modern human behavior is highly optimized, to bother only about immediate goals. The other day, I was reviewing a software architecture and asked the architect who the audience/consumer for this document is. She said it is the reviewers. I asked again hoping to identify the downstream process that uses this document, and got the same answer, a bit sternly this time.
This is AI's "dialup era" (pre-56k, maybe even the 2400 baud era).
We've got a bunch of models, but they don't fit into many products.
Companies and leadership were told to "adopt AI" and given crude tools with no instructions. Of course it failed.
Chat is an interesting UX, but it's primitive. We need better ways to connect domains, especially multi-dimensional ones.
Most products are "bolting on" AI. There are few products that really "get it". Adobe is one of the only companies I've seen with actually compelling AI + interface results, and even their experiments are just early demos [1-4]. (I've built open source versions of most of these.)
We're in for another 5 years of figuring this out. And we don't need monolithic AI models via APIs. We need access to the AI building blocks and sub networks so we can adapt and fine tune models to the actual control surfaces. That's when the real take off will happen.
[1] Relighting scenes: https://youtu.be/YqAAFX1XXY8?si=DG6ODYZXInb0Ckvc&t=211
[2] Image -> 3D editing: https://youtu.be/BLxFn_BFB5c?si=GJg12gU5gFU9ZpVc&t=185 (payoff is at 3:54)
[3] Image -> Gaussian -> Gaussian editing: https://youtu.be/z3lHAahgpRk?si=XwSouqEJUFhC44TP&t=285
[4] 3D -> image with semantic tags: https://youtu.be/z275i_6jDPc?si=2HaatjXOEk3lHeW-&t=443
edit: curious why I'm getting the flood of downvotes for saying we're too early. Care to offer a counter argument I can consider?
Then they extracted our privacy and sold it to advertisers.
Now with AI they're extracting our souls. Who do they expect to sell them to?
Notably, this story is pitched as a "News Story", but it's not really that at all; it's an opinion piece with a couple of quotes from AI opponents. Frustratingly, not many people understand what "Newsweek" is today, so they're always going to be able to collect some quotes for whatever story they're running.
Go and read all of the anti-AI articles and they will eventually boil down to something to the effect of:
“the problems we have are more foundational and fundamental and AI looks like a distraction”
However this is a directionless complaint that falls under the “complaining about technology“ trope
As a result there is no real coherent conversation about what AI is how do we define it what are people actually complaining about what are we rallying against because people are overwhelmingly utilizing it in every part of life
US (and the rest of the western world) citizens face real life problems in youth employment, social/political instability, unaffordable housing, internet addiction (yes, I believe that it is real problem that people spend 5 hours on their phones daily) and social atomisation. Meanwhile all resources are put in a rush into building technology that does not fundamentally improve people's well being. Advanced societies have had pretty good capabilities of doing writing, design, coding, searching information, etc. Now we are pouring all available resources, at any cost, to automate these processes even more. The costs of this operation are tremendous and it doesn't yield any results that improve everyday lives.
In 2020 there was a ton of UI/UX/graphics companies that could produce copious amount of visual content for the society while providing work to many people. Now we are about to automate this process and be able to generate infinite amount of graphics on demand. To what end? Were our capabilities to create graphics any kind of bottleneck before? I don't think so.
The stock market and tech leadership are completely decoupled from the problems that the majority of people faces. The real effect of AI at hand is to commoditise intellectual work that previously functioned well dispersed in society. This does not bring benefit to the majority of people.
CEO that jacked up EpiPen prices? GenX
Insurance CEO that was shot? GenX
Musk and Thiel, Satya Nadella, Sundar? GenX
Senior leadership and C-suite types are predominantly GenX now. Boomer leadership is tied up in Wall Street.
Backlash is just re-iterating the need for Boomers and GenX to cede stewardship of politics and the economy.
Biology is self-selecting. People who won't be around to deal with the fallout of their choices have little reason to change course.
It's on the next generations to invert the obvious ageism-driven decision making to prefer and over-value the walking dead.
Edit: Elon agrees it's best if older generations move on https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-believes-it-is-imp...
Am I stupid or is this a stupid line that proves the antithesis of what they want? It went from 4 in 5 being negative to less than half?
What even is journalism now.