I believe here the utility will perhaps come a lot later than the hype - The advances in multimodal settings have been great but reasoning not so much.
Several factors are in confluence to make this different from previous tech booms.
First, it's just too much too fast. Both the companies that make AI their business like OpenAI and the companies bolting AI onto everything have been forceful and abrasive with their pushing. Normally technology has more time to seep in and organically normalize with people for a while before the pushing begins, but this time the gas pedal was floored shortly after OpenAI had shipped a usable MVP.
Second, the value is far from clear for a lot of people, partly from lazy bolt-on integrations, but also just because people don't actually want/need it for many of the tasks it's being sold for and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks.
Third, as noted in the article, the surrounding environment isn't right. Many of your average people feel like the dog in the "this is fine" meme[0] and aren't really in the mood to be sold something that could ultimately further concentrate wealth and make their lives harder. It's like parking an ice cream truck in front of a burning office building and wondering why nobody running out is buying a cone.
I say this as someone who finds AI useful for some things. All of this is pretty plainly visible. Either the big names in the industry are horrifically out of touch or they're pretending to not see it in hopes of faking it until they make it, I'm not sure which.
Look at the massive and growing wealth & power inequality today, an age of aristocrats, then look at these AI fucks bragging about how AI will eliminate all white collar jobs. Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital. You can already see LLMs are making programmers much more productive but it's actually causing lower salaries and job losses - so who's capturing the value of that increased productivity? Not workers..
Meanwhile US government is overtly corrupt, criminal morons, they certainly don't care or have any sort of plan to distribute the gains from this technology evenly. Scott Bessent is saying with a smirk on his face that the tariff refunds will not go to consumers [1]. These people actively hate you and laugh at your powerlessness. Hating AI is the right response because the current political system ensures 10% of the benefits will accrue to most people and 90% to the elites, the power imbalance gets even more extreme and it will lead to techno-feudalism (as it has in the past).
Probably because at that time, normal people weren't rolling off the back of a massive inflationary period where they can no longer afford to look forward to having enough money to buy/use/participate in whatever cool new technology arises.
I think this is because the prevailing narrative around this bubble is:
A) AI gets very good and you'll lose your job.
OR
B) This whole thing is a bubble and because of how many eggs have been put in this single basket, when the bubble pops, you'll lose your job as we head into a recession.
It really does just seem like pure downside to the average person, not even to mention all the slop everywhere, deepfake revenge porn being democratized, and generally just having bad gpt wrappers shoved down your throat.
Edit: There really isn't a sense that AI is going to help the common person. Inequality is rising and AI seems to only fuel this fire. I hope that we as a society can actually distributed the fruits of AI to everyone... but I'm not holding my breath.
Virtually everyone I know is using AI, from helping with creative writing, to making video series, to programming, to homework help, to writing speeches.
And (almost) everyone said how terrible it is - and yet they all use it.
Give it a bit of time for people to understand the limitations, and where it shines and it will become an indispensable part of life.
We've had a few dud booms in the last fifteen years. 3D TV. VR. Metaverse. Electric cars in the US. They all worked technically, but just didn't catch on.
There was constant sneering at dot-com businesses and venture capitalists. There was FuckedCompany.com [0]. The Pets.com superbowl ad was seen as a cautionary tale.
Startup.com [1] portrayed paying parking tickets online as Sisyphean. People thought the internet was for porn and weirdos. Krugman famously said "By 2005 ... it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." [2]
Clay Shirky: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." [3]
A lot of the above was from mid to late 1990s but, in my opinion, living through it, it carried over into the 2000s with people being highly skeptical and quick to engage in shadenfruende whenever a company didn't live up to the hype.
There was plenty of internet and computer pessimism at the time as well, with the Internet expected to lead to more coal being used [0], being viewed as a conduit for scams [1], the risk of moral panics [2], and being blamed for causing the Columbine Massacre [3].
Ironically, this same author at the NYT (David Streitfeld) was a reporting negatively about the Dot-Com boom in the 1990s at the WashPo [4][5] as well as during the subsequent bust [6] and has been very public about his oride of being "low-tech" [7].
There is nothing wrong with that stance, but the entire premise of the article that techno-optimism was the norm which turned into techno-pessimism is clearly written in bad faith, when a large portion of the intelligentsia was already techno-pessimistic in the 1990s and 2000s, just like they were in the 80s, 70s, and earlier.
I feel this is because dot com was increased human connect and made the world closer. This boom is only about reducing cost for companies by reducing people. There is hardly any talk about improving user experience. This is very negative outcome imo. Businesses can't be only to serve their shareholders. People are under estimating the effect this would have on the economy and finally on these businesses themselves as economy is all about rotation of money. Once businesses stop paying salary and concentrate everything to their owners, economy grinds to halt.
AI boom is clearly anti human. People are fearing jobs, livelihoods, and their homes. I don't think anyone in right mind would have accepted this had this not been marketed the way it has been
I was too young to understand the dot com boom when it happened, being in grade school at the time. But I do remember when smartphones became not just a luxury, but a necessity, and how amazing the iPod seemed when it first came out. It was like something out of Star Trek.
Personally, I have that feeling when I use ChatGPT. It consistently blows my mind. OpenClaw is even more incredible, and I'm certainly not any kind of power user. I'm just testing the waters.
So why not that feeling of amazement / wonder / shock / awe? If you asked me, I'd say two things: first, I think the "wonder cycle" on older products has made us a bit jaded. Consider again the smartphone. When it came out, everyone was blown away -- now, our smartphones are more like chains to work, life, etc., and all anyone can talk about is how badly they want to be rid of them (while, of course, they use them every moment of the day!).
I think there may be a bit of, "Great, another technological miracle -- how long until I hate this, too?"
Second, I think Silicon Valley / tech has lost a lot of trust over the years as an industry. I remember once upon a time really loving Google's products. But Google got creepier and creepier, less and less consumer friendly and seemingly more focused on its bottomline, and . . . now I don't use any Google products. Same with Microsoft -- growing up near Seattle, Microsoft (like Boeing) was a "cool" company. Amazon was the same way. I even had a Facebook!
And now, not only do view all of these companies with some combination of disgust / suspicious / fear, I see pretty much any new tech company the same way. I would bet a lot of people feel this way. We're just waiting for the rug pull. I think the OpenAI ad thing was probably the first time where I felt my skin crawl a bit, and I think that'll keep on happening as time goes on and corporate drift makes these AI companies just like any other company out there.
Anyway, point being, I don't know if it's really tech itself that turns people off. It's the culture, the failed expectations, the lack of trust, everything, all smushed together.
Fewer people even knew about the dot com boom (or understood what it was) because the 24-hour news cycle didn’t exist yet and the means through which news and information would travel widely and rapidly (the subject of the boom itself) had not yet boomed. In contrast, news about AI seems almost inescapable. The discourse on the dot com boom was limited almost exclusively to people in tech and finance (who were poised to benefit the most) whereas the AI discussion is much broader and involves the general public, which is now rightly debating whether the upside is worth the cost.
The dot-com boom brought more people into the fold, such that the prosperity included regular people.
This one seems to bypass it by design, especially with the outsized negative impact on consumer products - whether with forced CoPilot buttons or irrationally expensive computer parts.
One underappreciated angle: the dot-com boom created new distribution channels that were broadly accessible. Anyone could put up a website and reach people. The AI boom is quietly reshuffling distribution in ways most companies haven't noticed yet.
We've been tracking how LLMs recommend products across categories. The correlation between Google ranking and LLM recommendation is near zero (0.08 across ~150 brands we tested). So a company that spent a decade building SEO authority can be completely invisible to ChatGPT, while a smaller competitor with better documentation and more mentions on Reddit or GitHub gets recommended instead.
That's a massive, silent redistribution of discovery -- and unlike the dot-com era, the companies being disrupted mostly don't even know it's happening yet.
20 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 45.6 ms ] threadFirst, it's just too much too fast. Both the companies that make AI their business like OpenAI and the companies bolting AI onto everything have been forceful and abrasive with their pushing. Normally technology has more time to seep in and organically normalize with people for a while before the pushing begins, but this time the gas pedal was floored shortly after OpenAI had shipped a usable MVP.
Second, the value is far from clear for a lot of people, partly from lazy bolt-on integrations, but also just because people don't actually want/need it for many of the tasks it's being sold for and because it's not good/reliable for some tasks.
Third, as noted in the article, the surrounding environment isn't right. Many of your average people feel like the dog in the "this is fine" meme[0] and aren't really in the mood to be sold something that could ultimately further concentrate wealth and make their lives harder. It's like parking an ice cream truck in front of a burning office building and wondering why nobody running out is buying a cone.
I say this as someone who finds AI useful for some things. All of this is pretty plainly visible. Either the big names in the industry are horrifically out of touch or they're pretending to not see it in hopes of faking it until they make it, I'm not sure which.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/16/1149232763/this-is-fine-meme-...
Meanwhile US government is overtly corrupt, criminal morons, they certainly don't care or have any sort of plan to distribute the gains from this technology evenly. Scott Bessent is saying with a smirk on his face that the tariff refunds will not go to consumers [1]. These people actively hate you and laugh at your powerlessness. Hating AI is the right response because the current political system ensures 10% of the benefits will accrue to most people and 90% to the elites, the power imbalance gets even more extreme and it will lead to techno-feudalism (as it has in the past).
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bessent-says-tariff-refund-ul...
A) AI gets very good and you'll lose your job.
OR
B) This whole thing is a bubble and because of how many eggs have been put in this single basket, when the bubble pops, you'll lose your job as we head into a recession.
It really does just seem like pure downside to the average person, not even to mention all the slop everywhere, deepfake revenge porn being democratized, and generally just having bad gpt wrappers shoved down your throat.
Edit: There really isn't a sense that AI is going to help the common person. Inequality is rising and AI seems to only fuel this fire. I hope that we as a society can actually distributed the fruits of AI to everyone... but I'm not holding my breath.
And (almost) everyone said how terrible it is - and yet they all use it.
Give it a bit of time for people to understand the limitations, and where it shines and it will become an indispensable part of life.
https://x.com/greg_ip/status/1991149493807353913
There was constant sneering at dot-com businesses and venture capitalists. There was FuckedCompany.com [0]. The Pets.com superbowl ad was seen as a cautionary tale.
Startup.com [1] portrayed paying parking tickets online as Sisyphean. People thought the internet was for porn and weirdos. Krugman famously said "By 2005 ... it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." [2]
Clay Shirky: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." [3]
A lot of the above was from mid to late 1990s but, in my opinion, living through it, it carried over into the 2000s with people being highly skeptical and quick to engage in shadenfruende whenever a company didn't live up to the hype.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20030226083257/http://www.redher...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
Wonder what’s next when the AI craze dies.
There was plenty of internet and computer pessimism at the time as well, with the Internet expected to lead to more coal being used [0], being viewed as a conduit for scams [1], the risk of moral panics [2], and being blamed for causing the Columbine Massacre [3].
Ironically, this same author at the NYT (David Streitfeld) was a reporting negatively about the Dot-Com boom in the 1990s at the WashPo [4][5] as well as during the subsequent bust [6] and has been very public about his oride of being "low-tech" [7].
There is nothing wrong with that stance, but the entire premise of the article that techno-optimism was the norm which turned into techno-pessimism is clearly written in bad faith, when a large portion of the intelligentsia was already techno-pessimistic in the 1990s and 2000s, just like they were in the 80s, 70s, and earlier.
[0] - https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=286...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/01/technology/internet-s-cha...
[2] - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/322796.322800
[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a...
[4] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/11/06/g...
[5] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1999/05/18/o...
[6] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-21-mn-24886...
[7] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/personaltech/t...
his company has grown from ~10 million to ~900 million users in three years. if that's not quickly enough, the problem is unreasonable expectations.
people like AI! they just don't want it to be shoved into absolutely every aspect of their lives at all times.
AI boom is clearly anti human. People are fearing jobs, livelihoods, and their homes. I don't think anyone in right mind would have accepted this had this not been marketed the way it has been
Personally, I have that feeling when I use ChatGPT. It consistently blows my mind. OpenClaw is even more incredible, and I'm certainly not any kind of power user. I'm just testing the waters.
So why not that feeling of amazement / wonder / shock / awe? If you asked me, I'd say two things: first, I think the "wonder cycle" on older products has made us a bit jaded. Consider again the smartphone. When it came out, everyone was blown away -- now, our smartphones are more like chains to work, life, etc., and all anyone can talk about is how badly they want to be rid of them (while, of course, they use them every moment of the day!).
I think there may be a bit of, "Great, another technological miracle -- how long until I hate this, too?"
Second, I think Silicon Valley / tech has lost a lot of trust over the years as an industry. I remember once upon a time really loving Google's products. But Google got creepier and creepier, less and less consumer friendly and seemingly more focused on its bottomline, and . . . now I don't use any Google products. Same with Microsoft -- growing up near Seattle, Microsoft (like Boeing) was a "cool" company. Amazon was the same way. I even had a Facebook!
And now, not only do view all of these companies with some combination of disgust / suspicious / fear, I see pretty much any new tech company the same way. I would bet a lot of people feel this way. We're just waiting for the rug pull. I think the OpenAI ad thing was probably the first time where I felt my skin crawl a bit, and I think that'll keep on happening as time goes on and corporate drift makes these AI companies just like any other company out there.
Anyway, point being, I don't know if it's really tech itself that turns people off. It's the culture, the failed expectations, the lack of trust, everything, all smushed together.
This one seems to bypass it by design, especially with the outsized negative impact on consumer products - whether with forced CoPilot buttons or irrationally expensive computer parts.
We've been tracking how LLMs recommend products across categories. The correlation between Google ranking and LLM recommendation is near zero (0.08 across ~150 brands we tested). So a company that spent a decade building SEO authority can be completely invisible to ChatGPT, while a smaller competitor with better documentation and more mentions on Reddit or GitHub gets recommended instead.
That's a massive, silent redistribution of discovery -- and unlike the dot-com era, the companies being disrupted mostly don't even know it's happening yet.
Until chatgpt integrate ads into their results