AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

Machine learning however works, and generates hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Both can be true!

No matter how much the chattering class wants to portray this as a "fad" and not an inevitability, those of us who can type and read can see the reality for ourselves.

Yah-- what we have now is enough to be enormously disruptive as it is absorbed.

The big question is how much better it's going to get. We may be plateauing in capability-- or at least slowing in capability growth-- or we may not be.

But it doesn't need to get better for it to eat a lot of peoples' lunch.

I think the AI itself is working extremely well. The state-of-the-art LLMs are exceptional at many real-world tasks and are deployed in many production code bases successfully.

The more recent AI failures (like the humane pin) are at least partially a hardware problem. These LLMs require huge amounts of compute to do nontrivial tasks, and a wearable just can't run locally with the current architectures.

That's a lot of words from someone who doesn't seem to have tried using these tools yet?

The Hype is smoke and mirrors, but there are tons of real use cases where things were MUCH easier than before. Things like text to speech or image recognition previously required a team of 10 ML engineers a couple of years to build now take a weekend.

It's smoke and mirrors to the "business world" because none of these translate into bottom line numbers though, and I think that's all this guy is able to see