Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

such a title!

It's not really about "ai hype", it's about funding.

"In the last few months, there has been this increasing so-called rift between the AI ethics and AI safety communities. There is a lot of talk about how this is an academic rift that needs to be resolved, how these communities are basically aiming for the same purpose. I think the thing that annoys me most about the discourse around this is that people don’t recognize this as a power struggle.

It is not really about intellectual merit of these ideas. Of course, there are lots of bad intellectual and academic claims that have been made on both sides. But that isn’t what this is really about. It’s about who gets funding, which concerns are prioritized. So looking at it as if it is like a clash of individuals or a clash of personalities just really undersells the whole thing, makes it sound like people are out there bickering, whereas in fact, it’s about something much deeper."

All snark aside it must be really tough to make a name for yourself by calling something snake oil only to have a flavor of it become massively successful...and then have to double down because you already had a book deal to fulfill.

The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely, and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo?

Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the non-coin-blockchain always struct me as a "hype train" or "snake oil" because it was a solution in search of a problem. NFTs are even worse since they haven't found any purpose to exist yet (money laundering?).

Contrast that with the "GPT" offerings (ChatGPT/Bing/Copilot/Bard/etc). Multiple of my colleagues are actively using them routinely every workday and when you demo it to another person, they understand it, and they too start utilizing it in their workflow. Heck, my mom discovered it herself on Bing's homepage and was telling me I should check it out.

That's the opposite of "snake oil" or a hype train, it is arguably a competitive threat to search engines.

PS - Small disclaimer: "AI" is a nebulous term. I'm talking specifically about LLMs. Other types of "AI" have already been here for a long time making our lives better (e.g. computer vision).

I'm routinely using LLMs in place of search engines. Would you rather type in a cocktail and instantly get a recipe? or do you want to open google, scroll past 50 ads, click through a bunch of blogspam that gives you the history of cocktails, the prohibition, the chemical formula for ethanol and their life story, followed by a recipe that was itself generated by a substandard AI model anyway

edit: I'm prepared for the enshittification of GenAI, but given competitive edge, many people will pay top $ for faster/higher parameter inference, I'm hoping ad support is minimal on the super deluxe god tier AI subscription which I'll have to pile all of my spare cash into.