"All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.
> No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
Perhaps this is the failure to understand the distinction between a technology and a meta-technology. Upgrading the factory that builds the robots is much different than upgrading the robots.
What is the point being made here? Some past technologies were overhyped, therefore AI is overhyped? Well, some past consumer technologies did change the world (smartphones, texting, video streaming, dating apps, online shopping, etc), so where's the argument that AI doesn't belong to this second group?
Also, every single close friend of mine makes some use of LLMs, while none of them used any the overhyped technologies listed. So you need a specially strong argument to group them together.
By the looks of it, 2026 might be the year where reality and fiction will finally collide with AI and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.
But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.
AI is real but the socio-political environment is far from conductive to some form of productive use of it - as opposed to using it as a war-machine - AI isn't going to fail in that role but very few will be happy about it.
I mean, disillusionment is the least of my worries.
> most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong
I was so expecting to find this wind-up aimed at those peddling the "AI is hype" laziness.
It's laziness because they have little CS fundamentals to base such claims on, and the deductions can be made, just not clearly to people who need to study a lot more.
It's like watching an invisible train (visible to those with strong CS) rolling down the tracks at a leisurely pace. Those sitting in their stalled car on the tracks are busy tweeting about "AI HPY PE TRAIN." Until it wrecks their car, the gimmick is free oxygen. It's a lot easier to write articles than it is to build GPUs and write programs.
There are all sorts of algorithms in use that were once thought of as AI, but transitioned to being mere algorithms well before they entered public awareness, if they did that at all. Some are still useful and used everywhere, but they have never been thought of as AI by the public. For them, AI is a term that has long been reserved for some far-off, sci-fi future.
LLM's are not artificial general intelligence (i.e. not sci-fi AI). Why haven't they transitioned to being mere algorithms by now? Why is the public being told AI is finally arriving when it's really just another algorithm?
We have some truly slick and shady corporations involved in the bubble right now and they're marketing LLM's like tobacco. LLM's have been pushed out, at immense cost, to the public in a way that makes them more directly accessible to average people than any past algorithm. Young children can ask a LLM to do their homework for them. Middle managers can ask a LLM to create a (shitty) ad campaign for them. Corporations have gone to tremendous expense to make that widely available and, for the moment, mostly free. They seem to be following the Joe Camel school of marketing. Get them hooked while they're young so they come to you first when they're older! The only difference is that nobody is stepping in to stop the new Joe Camel from handing out free samples to kids.
Then there's the "go big" aspects of the bubble. The major competitors are trying to out-spend each other to dominance, but the suckers are so colossally big that their bubble is affecting global GPU, memory, and storage prices. This bubble is going to stress power grids wherever it operates and do considerable environmental harm. The financial games being played behind the bubble are absolutely stupid. The results, so far, are tantalizing for billionaires. LLM's offer the promise of being able to fire all their pesky and annoying human workers. It won't deliver on that, and none of these companies is ever going to make enough to pay their debts. There might be "too big to fail" government bailouts, but there are going to be some big bankruptcies too.
Useful algorithms will come out of all this, a lot of tears too, but not "AI".
I hoped the article would be be a meta-discussion of "time" and perhaps relativity or some other phenomenon. Sigh, it's an investment thesis saying "This Time is Different" is a risky bet.
That's not a refutation. It's a list of silly cartoons designed to make the reader feel smart, thrown together by one of the leaders of the AI cult. Do you people know any other writers?
I get that everyone has a strong opinion on whats-going-to-happen-with-AI, but I really think nobody knows.
We're in that part of turbulence where we don't know if the floating leaf is going to go left or right.
The people who will have the hardest time with this transition are those who go all in on a specific prediction and then discover they were wrong.
If you want to avoid that, you can try very very hard to just not be wrong, but as I said, I don't think that's possible.
Instead, we need to be flexible and surf the wave as it comes. Maybe AI fades away like VR. Or maybe it reshapes the world like the internet/smartphones. The hardest thing to do right now, when everyone is yelling, is to just wait and see what happens. But maybe that's the right thing to do.
[p.s.: None of this means don't try to influence events. If you've got a frontier model you've been working on, please try to steer us safely.]
Everything is the same until it's not, good luck predicting when "until it's not" is on the horizon though. Isn't technology innovation a power law thing? Everything hums along fairly regular and then, out of the blue, there's a massive impact. Personally, I think AI has made a pretty large impact in software dev and overall tech industry but I don't see AGI any time soon (and that hype has died down) and therefore I don't see the economics working out. The coding tools, API integrations, chatbots, those are great but I don't see them producing the returns required to keep companies like OpenAI running unless OpenAI takes all the customers and all the ad clicks from everyone else ( Athropic, Alhphabet, X, Amazon, Meta, even Microsoft ). I just don't see that happening.
Honestly, the remixes this generation suck compared to priors.
"This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn't different, it just had more money behind it this time.
"NFTs are different", as collectors of trading cards, art prints, coins, postage stamps, and an infinite glut of collectibles looked at each other with that knowing, "oh lord, here we go" glance.
"Crypto is different", as those who paid attention to history remembered corporate scrip, gift cards, hedge funds, the S&L crisis, Enron, the MBS crisis, and the multitude of prior currency-related crises and grifts bristled at the impending glut of fraud and abuse by those too risky to engage in traditional commerce.
And thus, here we are again. "This time is different", as those of us who remembered the code generators of yore pollute our floppy drives and salesgrifts convinced our bosses that their program could replace those expensive programmers roll our eyes at the obvious bullshit on naked display, then vomited from stress as over a trillion dollars was diverted from anything of value into their modern equivalent - with all the same problems as before.
I truly hate how stupidly people with money actually behave.
this just looks like someone hearing about tons of hyped things from people across the internet (which almost by definition, is full of false signals and grifters), imagining they are coming from the same person, then arguing with how wrong that person always is. how is that interesting?
LLMs have not radically transformed the world yet because the number of people capable of solving problems by typing into a blinking cursor on a blank screen is actually quite small. Take that subset of the population and reduce it to those that can effectively write communicative prose, and its even smaller still.
It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.
Hiring seems to be way down in my world as a result of LLM. It isn't so much people staring blankly that I worry about, but companies thinking hey maybe we can get away with not replacing headcount for a while longer, or maybe this tool will help bootstrap the offshore team to be at parity with the expensive onshore team.
I’m doing enterprise coding tasks that used to take a month of whole team coordination from mockups to through development and testing in 3 days now. It’s all test driven development, codex 5.3 and a small team of two people who know how to hold it right orchestrating the agents. There’s no reason not to work this way. The sociotechnical engineering aspects of this change are fascinating and rewarding to solve.
>Blockchain... NFTs
>The problem is, the same dudes who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Intelligence.
I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?
The hype around AI is admittedly annoying - especially from the Wall St crowd who don't know how to pronounce 'Nvidia' correctly, and who haven't managed to internalize the fact that the chatbots they use hallucinate.
It really is 'different', though, in the same way the Internet was.
It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble popped half-way through that period of time.
AI might 'underwhelm' for another five or ten years. And then it won't. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.
This lazy kind of post annoys me because it sort of groups any of us saying that this technology is profoundly different in with all the town criers who have said this kind of thing before — even if we have never said it before and were even skeptical of past declarations
Effectively, it’s a statement saying nothing can ever be profoundly different, because people have said it before and been wrong.
For all of those, there is a gartner hype cycle. The thing that matters is when it comes out the back end, is 1m, 1b, 6b people using it?
for all the things you listed, less than 1000 people are using it, with AI we're clearly not finished with the gartner hype cycle, but the back end is going to be over a billion users.
I’ve never heard half of the things and the other half is mostly consumer electronics or specific product names. The closest example here is Quantum Computing, which is also a serious technology in development. I think for the OP these are all tech buzzwords that he invests in without understanding what they really are. That’s why he thinks all these unrelated things are the same.
To my mind at least, it is different. I lean heavily on AI for both admin and coding tasks. I just filled out a multipage form to determine my alimony payments in Germany. Gemini was an absolute godsend, helping answer questions in, translate to English, draft explanations, emails requesting time extensions to the Jugendamt case worker.
This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me.
I have an idea for a programming language based on asymmetric multimethods and whitespace sensitive, Pratt-parsing powered syntax extensibility. Gemini and Claude are going to be instrumental in getting that done in a reasonable amount of time.
My daily todos are now being handled by NanoClaw.
These are already real products, it's not mere hype. Simply no comparison to blockchain or NFTs or the other tech mentioned. Is some of the press on AI overly optimistic? Sure.
But especially for someone who suffers from ADHD (and a lot of debilitating trauma and depression), and can't rely on their (transphobic) family for support -- it's literally the only source of help, however imperfect, which doesn't degrade me for having this affliction. It makes things much less scary and overwhelming, and I honestly don't know where I'd be without it.
63 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 81.4 ms ] threadLove the Sir Terry reference.
"All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.
> No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
- Terry Pratchet's Faust Eric"
New things are happening and it's exciting. "AI bad" statements without examples feel very head-in-sand.
Also, every single close friend of mine makes some use of LLMs, while none of them used any the overhyped technologies listed. So you need a specially strong argument to group them together.
But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.
I mean, disillusionment is the least of my worries.
I was so expecting to find this wind-up aimed at those peddling the "AI is hype" laziness.
It's laziness because they have little CS fundamentals to base such claims on, and the deductions can be made, just not clearly to people who need to study a lot more.
It's like watching an invisible train (visible to those with strong CS) rolling down the tracks at a leisurely pace. Those sitting in their stalled car on the tracks are busy tweeting about "AI HPY PE TRAIN." Until it wrecks their car, the gimmick is free oxygen. It's a lot easier to write articles than it is to build GPUs and write programs.
LLM's are not artificial general intelligence (i.e. not sci-fi AI). Why haven't they transitioned to being mere algorithms by now? Why is the public being told AI is finally arriving when it's really just another algorithm?
We have some truly slick and shady corporations involved in the bubble right now and they're marketing LLM's like tobacco. LLM's have been pushed out, at immense cost, to the public in a way that makes them more directly accessible to average people than any past algorithm. Young children can ask a LLM to do their homework for them. Middle managers can ask a LLM to create a (shitty) ad campaign for them. Corporations have gone to tremendous expense to make that widely available and, for the moment, mostly free. They seem to be following the Joe Camel school of marketing. Get them hooked while they're young so they come to you first when they're older! The only difference is that nobody is stepping in to stop the new Joe Camel from handing out free samples to kids.
Then there's the "go big" aspects of the bubble. The major competitors are trying to out-spend each other to dominance, but the suckers are so colossally big that their bubble is affecting global GPU, memory, and storage prices. This bubble is going to stress power grids wherever it operates and do considerable environmental harm. The financial games being played behind the bubble are absolutely stupid. The results, so far, are tantalizing for billionaires. LLM's offer the promise of being able to fire all their pesky and annoying human workers. It won't deliver on that, and none of these companies is ever going to make enough to pay their debts. There might be "too big to fail" government bailouts, but there are going to be some big bankruptcies too.
Useful algorithms will come out of all this, a lot of tears too, but not "AI".
Internet - this time is different
iPhone - this time is different
We're in that part of turbulence where we don't know if the floating leaf is going to go left or right.
The people who will have the hardest time with this transition are those who go all in on a specific prediction and then discover they were wrong.
If you want to avoid that, you can try very very hard to just not be wrong, but as I said, I don't think that's possible.
Instead, we need to be flexible and surf the wave as it comes. Maybe AI fades away like VR. Or maybe it reshapes the world like the internet/smartphones. The hardest thing to do right now, when everyone is yelling, is to just wait and see what happens. But maybe that's the right thing to do.
[p.s.: None of this means don't try to influence events. If you've got a frontier model you've been working on, please try to steer us safely.]
"This time will be different," they said about the Metaverse, ignoring the vast tranches of MUCKs, MUDs, MMOs, LSGs, and repeated digital real estate gold rushes of the past half-century. Billions burned on something anyone who played Second Life, Entropia, FFXIV, EQ2, VRChat, or fucking Furcadia could've told you wasn't going to succeed, because it wasn't different, it just had more money behind it this time.
"NFTs are different", as collectors of trading cards, art prints, coins, postage stamps, and an infinite glut of collectibles looked at each other with that knowing, "oh lord, here we go" glance.
"Crypto is different", as those who paid attention to history remembered corporate scrip, gift cards, hedge funds, the S&L crisis, Enron, the MBS crisis, and the multitude of prior currency-related crises and grifts bristled at the impending glut of fraud and abuse by those too risky to engage in traditional commerce.
And thus, here we are again. "This time is different", as those of us who remembered the code generators of yore pollute our floppy drives and salesgrifts convinced our bosses that their program could replace those expensive programmers roll our eyes at the obvious bullshit on naked display, then vomited from stress as over a trillion dollars was diverted from anything of value into their modern equivalent - with all the same problems as before.
I truly hate how stupidly people with money actually behave.
It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.
Are you just not doing that anymore?
Deep disconnect from reality.
I was firmly in the camp that blockchain was not a viable solution to any problem, and that NFTs sound stupid. I think AI is much different than that list. So, there goes your argument?
NFTs was always stupid; blockchain (not crypto) has plenty of real world applicability
It really is 'different', though, in the same way the Internet was.
It took about 20 years (ie: since The World ISP) for the Internet to work its way into every facet of life. And the dot com bubble popped half-way through that period of time.
AI might 'underwhelm' for another five or ten years. And then it won't. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.
Effectively, it’s a statement saying nothing can ever be profoundly different, because people have said it before and been wrong.
Lazy.
for all the things you listed, less than 1000 people are using it, with AI we're clearly not finished with the gartner hype cycle, but the back end is going to be over a billion users.
I’ve never heard half of the things and the other half is mostly consumer electronics or specific product names. The closest example here is Quantum Computing, which is also a serious technology in development. I think for the OP these are all tech buzzwords that he invests in without understanding what they really are. That’s why he thinks all these unrelated things are the same.
This is super scary stuff for an ADHDer like me.
I have an idea for a programming language based on asymmetric multimethods and whitespace sensitive, Pratt-parsing powered syntax extensibility. Gemini and Claude are going to be instrumental in getting that done in a reasonable amount of time.
My daily todos are now being handled by NanoClaw.
These are already real products, it's not mere hype. Simply no comparison to blockchain or NFTs or the other tech mentioned. Is some of the press on AI overly optimistic? Sure.
But especially for someone who suffers from ADHD (and a lot of debilitating trauma and depression), and can't rely on their (transphobic) family for support -- it's literally the only source of help, however imperfect, which doesn't degrade me for having this affliction. It makes things much less scary and overwhelming, and I honestly don't know where I'd be without it.