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I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

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Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#61

Post by mjr00 »

latexr wrote: post #51
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #44

A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the econo…

The amount of misuse this quote gets is as absurd as it is tiresome. People were using it to defend NFTs too. Someone’s opinion on one thing says nothing about someone else’s opinion about a different thing.

Yeah, the Krugman quote gets pulled out around literally everything. Bitcoin/Blockchain/NFTs, Metaverse, AR/VR, I'm sure some other things I was forgetting.

For every Krugman "the internet will be as useful as the fax machine" quote, there's a corresponding quote like Gartner in 2022 - "Gartner Predicts 25% of People Will Spend At Least One Hour Per Day in the Metaverse by 2026."[0]

[0] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-02-0...

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#62

Post by alganet »

Uehreka wrote: post #47
chubot wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the personal computer counts, do mobile phones count? I would certainly think so, except all those high quality sensors have been hindered by app stores and subpar apps, imo :-( I would like to hear some uplifting stories about creative things people do with their phones, rather than consume media

Speaking as someone who just rebuked another commenter for daring to suggest Dijkstra’s algorithm should be on that list… yeah you may have a point. Mobile phones probably belong in the S-Tier with the Internet. In 2012-2014 I lived in Thailand right as the Smartphone Wave was cresting. I saw people who had never owned a computer leapfrog laptops and get online for the first time (on their own terms) with a cheap sma…

Miniaturization is a common trend.

Once modern computers appeared, smartphones became just a matter of time.

One could say that sucessful miniaturization is one of the tells that something is more likely to stick around.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#64

Post by simonw »

latexr wrote: post #45
ninetyninenine wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad. AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage. I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two year…

> I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI It was never this level of AI. The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about. No one ever fantasised about AI which couldn’t accurately count the number of letters in a common word or that would give you provably wrong information in an assertive autho…

"The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about."

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - some of the earliest mainstream AI science fiction (1968, before even the Apollo moon landing!) was very much about an AI you couldn't trust.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#65

Post by alganet »

SecretDreams wrote: post #53
alganet wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPUs might actually make the list before LLMs. One could argue that it is the fourth item on that list, since it is a technology that is standing for a long time by now.

There are so many items I'd put on the list before LLMs tbh. It's not even worth the time having the conversation. My quality of life went up much more in the dial up to dsl transition. I wouldn't say DSL to fibre was as much of a jump, e.g. Anywho, that quality of life jump to DSL ultimately led to the enshitification of the internet I knew and loved and now I'm stuck talking about LLMs I wish didn't exist - I would…

To define what a breakthrough is, is hard.

A "gaming PC" defines how GPUs are important. General people know something there ticks different, specialists know, industries know. It matters. It matters for a long time now.

"Broadband" was a hype, temporary. Once people understood that the speed is the thing, not any name, it stopped mattering. Now every couple of years there's a mini "new broadband tech" but it's all the same. Of course the tech is important. But revolutionary? I don't know. It boils down to being what is defined as generally "the internet".

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#66

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #25
mcdeltat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty arbitrary list, no? You could replace "LLMs" with various technologies that seem important (particularly at the beginning of their existence before their true value is determined). Why not: C, cloud computing, neural networks, Dijkstra's algorithm, WiFi, FFT, etc?

Its a matter of opinion who cares what I think - if your list includes those things as fundamental changes that redefined society and technology then that's valid. All I am saying is that LLMs are amongst the most revolutionary changes that break new ground and completely change the world - in my personal opinion.

LLMs could be one of the most revolutionary changes. The problem is that LLMs as a phenomenon are mostly wishful thinking and an acceptance of downgraded quality and reliability.

Sometimes they do useful things. But the gap between "sometimes" and "reliably" is not trivial.

It's honestly rather culty. I can see the hope that mistakes in today's vibe coding will be fixed by future vibe coding, which will be better in every way.

But it's not a given that's going to happen. Not on the evidence so far.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#67

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

sqs wrote: post #17

What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes. > It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that i…

>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?

Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today?

This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025:

https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518

Whence I quote:

  i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution
Do you remember someone from the databases industry claiming that databases are going to be "like the renaissance" or lik the industrial revolution? Oracle? Microsoft? PostgreSQL?

Here's another one with an excerpt of an interview with Demis Hssabis, dated April 17, 2025:

https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/1912929020905206233

Whence I quote:

  " I think maybe in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease."

  Nobel Prize Winner and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on how AI can revolutionize drug discovery doing "science at digital speed."
Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"? Data centers? Computers in general? All disease?

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#68

Post by alganet »

shikon7 wrote: post #58
alganet wrote: post #8

Rather, let's look for things in tech that never hyped but are very useful. If hype is bad, then there must be something good, and unhyped to such high proportions. Something unhypable. Otherwise it's all crap, isn't it? It can't be like that.

Probably these things exist, but if they are truly unhypeable, only a select few will ever know of it, and their economic and societal impact will remain negligible.

I know of a couple used by millions unaware they are actually a thing.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#69

Post by da_chicken »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #67
sqs wrote: post #17

What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes. > It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that i…

>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today? This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025: https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518 Whence I quote: i think this is gonna be more like…

The last time I remember the hype being even remotely real was Web 2.0. And most of everything that made that hypeworthy is long gone (interoperability and open standards like RSS or free APIs) or turned out to be genuinely awful ("social media was a mistake") or has become far worse than what it replaced (SaaS).

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#70

Post by lgrapenthin »

cafed00d wrote: post #16

To me, AI hype seems to be the most tangible/real hype in a decade. Ever since mobile & cloud era at their peaks in 2012 or 2014, we’ve had Crypto, AR, VR, and now AI. I have some pocket change bitcoin, ethereum, played around for 2 minutes on my dust-gathering Oculus & Vision Pro; but man, oh man! Am I hooked to ChatGpt or what! It’s truly remarkably useful! You just can’t get this type of thing in one click before.…

Your example is a better search engine. The AI hype however is the promise that it will be smarter (not just more knowledgeable) than humans and replace all jobs.

And it isn't on the way there. Just today, a leading state of the art model, that supposedly passed all the most difficult math entry exams and whatever they "benchmark", reasoned with the assumption of "60 days in January". It would simply assume that and draw conclusions, as if that were normal. It also wasn't able to corrrectly fill out all possible scores in a two player game with four moves and three rules, that I made up. It would get them wrong over and over.

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