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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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are at this point almost 8 years old (dating from the Attention is All You Need paper). If it's truly a revolutionary technology, you should be able to point me to a company leveraging LLMs to make absolute bank, leaving all of its non-LLM-based competitors in the dust. But instead, what I see in this thread in defense of the revolutionary ideals of LLMs, is how good future LLMs are going to be. That's not a sig…

Large Language Models are not 8 years old. GPT-3 or arguably GPT-2 is the first L LM. Moreover, I can think of 0 revolutionary technologies that did what you've said in such timelines. The Internet, Smartphones, The Steam Engine - the idea that revolutionary technology is created and everything changes in an instant is bizarre fiction. And how well would you know really? Not everyone using LLMs internally is screamin…

Steam locomotives: the first practical steam locomotive was Stephenson's Rocket in 1829, although maybe you want count from the earlier locomotive developed for the Stockington and Darlington in 1825. In either case, by 1830, there was already a successful company producing steam locomotives, and everyone pursing the building of railroads were using or imminently planning to convert to using steam locomotives for tractive power.

Naval technology can be even more stark. HMS Dreadnought was a revolution in terms of battleship design; all the major naval countries were building dreadnoughts before she was completed (actually, a few started before she was even laid down!).

That's a feature you see a lot of revolutionary technologies experience: even the earliest incarnations have enough "wow" factor to push people to using them and improving from the get-go.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

I guess OP hated it when Bill Gates said "personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created." Or Vint Cerf, "The Internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world."

Yea, and the internet never went through a hype bubble that ultimately burst ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#144
Kind of a bad article (IMO) when it sideswipes cloud computing.

The "cloud" was actually useful, and helped to scale so many companies that could bring their products to millions of people quickly and without too many issues, and with good reliability.

Blockchain, hyper enabled gambling, cryptocurrency, and jamming "AI" into everything are bad though.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#145
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>It was never this level of AI. You're completely out of it. We couldn't even get AI to hold a freaking conversation. It was so bad we came up with this thing called the turing test and that was the benchmark. Now people like you are all, like "well it's obvious the turing test was garbage". No. It's not obvious. It's the hype got to your head. If we found a way to travel at light speed for 3 dollars the hype would b…

LLMs are glorified, overhyped autocomplete systems that fail, but in different, nondeterministic ways than existing autocomplete systems fail. They are neat, but unreliable toys, not “more profound than fire or electricity” as has been breathless claimed.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#146
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>It was never this level of AI. You're completely out of it. We couldn't even get AI to hold a freaking conversation. It was so bad we came up with this thing called the turing test and that was the benchmark. Now people like you are all, like "well it's obvious the turing test was garbage". No. It's not obvious. It's the hype got to your head. If we found a way to travel at light speed for 3 dollars the hype would b…

I remember how ~5 years ago I said - here on HN - that AI will pass TT within 2 years. I was downvoted into oblivion. People said I was delusional and that it won’t happen in their lifetime.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large Language Models are not 8 years old. GPT-3 or arguably GPT-2 is the first L LM. Moreover, I can think of 0 revolutionary technologies that did what you've said in such timelines. The Internet, Smartphones, The Steam Engine - the idea that revolutionary technology is created and everything changes in an instant is bizarre fiction. And how well would you know really? Not everyone using LLMs internally is screamin…

Steam locomotives: the first practical steam locomotive was Stephenson's Rocket in 1829, although maybe you want count from the earlier locomotive developed for the Stockington and Darlington in 1825. In either case, by 1830, there was already a successful company producing steam locomotives, and everyone pursing the building of railroads were using or imminently planning to convert to using steam locomotives for tra…

>That's a feature you see a lot of revolutionary technologies experience: even the earliest incarnations have enough "wow" factor to push people to using them and improving from the get-go.

ChatGPT alone had over 400 Million weekly active users in February (and seem to have hit 500M) and was the 6th most visited site in the world last month.

This is software that was introduced to the public in Nov of 2022. To put it frankly, it's the fastest growing software service ever.

Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were the only sites with more visits. It's close enough to Twitter that it may well overtake it this month.

It's not up for debate. LLMs absolutely have that "wow" factor.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/02/20/ope...

https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/viral-trend-drives-c...

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#148

> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI. Cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there. I fail to see how that's hype.

The hype is that “cloud” is and makes everything magically better / easier / more secure / more efficient etc. Many companies jumped head first into large-scale cloud migrations and buildouts without any thought about where and how “cloud” makes sense, what the risks / downsides / true costs are, etc. Just like they are doing now with AI.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#149
post #131

> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI. Cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there. I fail to see how that's hype.

> I fail to see how that's hype. Server management, data center and related business existed ages ago. What's hype is this cloud? People are made to believe that cloud is not a server or servers. It's an enhancement sure, but not something completely new or different. > it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there And most of them would be fine without it. Rent some racks. Run some servers. That's ex…

It is a service layer that enabled organizational efficiency.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please find me someone with any background in technology who thinks AI is complete garbage (zero value or close to it). The author doesn't think so, they assert that "perhaps 10% of the AI hype is based upon useful facts" and "AI functions greatly as a "search engine" replacement". There is a big difference between thinking something is garbage and thinking something is a massive bubble (in the case of AI, this could…

Nobody is talking about a financial bubble. That's orthoganol. Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing. The blog post is talking about the hype in general and about AI in general. It is not just referring to the financial opportunity. You can use chatGPT for free. Does that mean it's total shit because openAI allowed you to use it for free? No. It's still freaking revolutionary.

> Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing.

Gull-wing doors on cars. Both awesome and flawed.

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