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There is a pattern at work similar to Crypto, Quantum Computers and other hype topics: Non-tech people getting very excited about it and constantly babbling abo

by baxtr 4y ago

There is a pattern at work similar to Crypto, Quantum Computers and other hype topics: Non-tech people getting very excited about it and constantly babbling about how this is a great revolution and everything will done by AI starting tomorrow. Oh, by the way: anyone remember Autonomous Driving or IoT?

rvz 4y ago
Yes. It was screamed about being the next thing, every single day. This has happened to crypto / blockchain and Quantum Computers, except that the hype in crypto is over (for now) and the hype cycles are no different to AI and IoT. If you ask me, it seems that all of them are a hype train to a worse dystopia. Now the grift is continuing on ChatGPT.
seydor 4y ago
Or VR, or shitcoins, or the Cloud. That was not organic engagement, it was clearly being pushed to tech circles with various means. This is a different kind though, cause openAI didn't do much fanfare. I find it exciting, most exciting than anything else in the past decade and it s already usable , not a promise 10 years down the road.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Wait, Cloud computing is a failure or something that didn't live up to the hype in your eyes?
  - seydor 4y ago
    overhyped, not a failure
    - angryasian 4y ago
      honestly thats a weird take. IMO its one of the greatest transformations in the last 20 years.
      - seydor 4y ago
        But is it better?
        angryasian 4y ago
        Its certainly debatable but overall I'd say yes.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  It depends on at which point. Modern VR started with the Oculus Kickstarter -- it was as nerdy as it gets. Some random nerd nobody had heard of (Palmer Luckey) just had a vision. It was announced on various very nerdy sites (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6172881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6172881). One of the big draws was John Carmack's endorsement. Yeah, later Facebook nabbed them, but before then it was pure nerdy enthusiasm, and to a decent degree it still is. Bitcoin also started in very tight knit, technical circles, part people with libertarian ideals, part cypherpunks, part just random nerds curious about playing with new tech. Today the scene is very, very different.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    The end is the same in both cases: Oculus and Bitcoin in their "indie" phases were both insignificant, i.e. not adopted enough to cause problems for the wider world. Once both were co-opted by parties with enormous amounts of capital, both diverted heavily from their original missions. Oculus is now a tool for Zuck's Second Life clone, and Bitcoin has never been further away from being used as an actual currency.
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      Yeah, and? Pretty much nobody gets to change the world as a normal person. Most things/people either stay at local notoriety, or get adopted by various large entities which then do the world-wide lifting. Eg, when we think about AI art, we're not thinking about the CompVis group at LMU Munich, we're thinking about DALL-E, Midjourney and NovelAI.
fullshark 4y ago
Autonomous driving continues to make progress and pretty much every consumer device being like smart TVs which collect telemetry data whether you want them to or not still seems inevitable to me.
yreg 4y ago
>Non-tech people getting very excited about it and constantly babbling about how this is a great My experience is the opposite. Non-techy people are unimpressed. If they want to see an image of a dragon, they can put the word in Google Image Search and get just that, so what's so special about Stable Diffusion? Meanwhile, (to paraphrase a comment I read on this website) many of us, techy people still cannot pick our jaws from the floor since April when Dalle2 was introduced. Of course, it's fine to be not-interested and I get how annoying the current hn discussions must be for some.
- willsmith72 4y ago
  Yep this matches my experience too. Me showing non tech people so far is a bit of a let down, at least for a few minutes until they understand better what they could do with it
  - gibspaulding 4y ago
    Same here. I've been showing it to my computer science students and most of my freshmen seem pretty uninterested, but my more advanced students had a much stronger reaction. I also found that my students tended to suggest really simple prompts at first which don't really show off what the tech is actually capable of. I've had to help a lot by adding more stipulations or details to their prompts to get a response that actually got their attention.
- ggrelet 4y ago
  I got my dad to request an André Derain style painting of a cowboy riding a dodo bird. That image most probably didn't exist anywhere before the prompt. I can say the excitement was really real when the output came out! You just have to guide non-tech people into what the tool can do.
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  AI definitely falls into the category of business people asking me to use it in our technology. A couple of weeks ago I had to write out how we could leverage AI/ML in our software in spite of the fact that we have a mountain of problems that they aren't a good fit for to get through first. The last time I remember the business trying to force specific technologies into products like this was the blockchain craze of around 2017.
nwsm 4y ago
In the case of AI writing and art it seems to be exclusively tech people interested in it. Chat bots have existed in some form for decades so normal people are not impressed, and those interested in writing or art strongly dislike it for several reasons.
- marban 4y ago
  The abysmal experiences with chatbots have burned the floor for the next decade like Crypto has done for fintechs.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    I believe the Silicon Valley PC term for these was "conversational commerce".
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Which is a quite informative term, as it precisely describes the very use case none of the users actually want.
amusedcyclist 4y ago
Its so predictable at this point. SV is just such a BS hype machine. There was 1 truly great revolution (the internet + smart phones) and everyone's trying to replicate it to make the big $$$. Its not going to happen. We are now in the steady state till the next truly big thing hits.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pksebben 4y ago
  if the Internet is the watermark, I don't see how cell phones make the cut. The Internet democratized and distributed information sharing at scale, and cell phones created the means of economic capture of that technology (I believe this to be a massive regression). Oh, and we had significantly less planned obsolescence prior to the cell phone era, although that could just be coincidence.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Cell phones enable computing-related activity (ecommerce, email/IM), without requiring the overhead of knowing how to use a computer (or being able to afford one). In the developed world, smartphones brought a generation of boomers online, people who went their entire careers without regular use of a computer terminal. In the developing world, the smartphone was the first computing device for many people.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Well the original revolution was the one with silicon.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
While I agree with you and other commenter, putting all in the same basket is not really fair. Shitcoins were shitcoins from the start and it hasn't changed. Real quantum computers will take decades to construct as it's an engineering problem. But it doesn't prevent us to play with the existing hardware, using the available tricks to reduce noise etc. and get the feeling of how it could be useful. Crypto (as in cryptocoins, not cryptography) was an interesting idea that was turned into a Ponzi scheme. Still, one day when the dust settles, maybe somebody will construct a reasonable alternative immune to the mistakes made in the past (well, I doubt it, but life taught me nothing is impossible). Autonomous driving got overhyped and irresponsible companies driven by greed started to send on the streets vehicles that weren't 100% ready for the task. I believe we will see AD one day, but I don't believe it will happen very soon. IoT is basically everywhere, maybe we're not using that name any longer, maybe "smart" sounds better. Try buying a consumer TV without it. VR is a very interesting tech development for certain niches and I'm happy it's being developed even though I can't stand 5 minutes in the current hardware. I believe there are many advantages of such a solution, but probably just a fraction of what Meta marketing department says - their proposals are simply ridiculous. The cloud is similarly everywhere. All significant hosting providers started providing cloud services. Maybe marketers try to deliberately make the term fuzzier, but from the technical point of view it's an amalgamation of technologies for managing virtual machines spanning over multiple physical servers - and that's incredibly useful.
quonn 4y ago
Both are actually making progress, it just took longer.
verdenti 4y ago
Vermeulen 4y ago
it's weird seeing IoT as if that was all hype then died off - I literally have 30 or so devices in my home that are Wifi connected (lights, smart speakers...). Like a lot of other hyped technologies it was in the news initially, didn't come as fast as commenters thought, then slowly built up to actually fulfill it's promise. Autonomous driving likely the same

by baxtr 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

Yes. It was screamed about being the next thing, every single day. This has happened to crypto / blockchain and Quantum Computers, except that the hype in crypto is over (for now) and the hype cycles are no different to AI and IoT. If you ask me, it seems that all of them are a hype train to a worse dystopia. Now the grift is continuing on ChatGPT.

seydor 4y ago

Or VR, or shitcoins, or the Cloud. That was not organic engagement, it was clearly being pushed to tech circles with various means. This is a different kind though, cause openAI didn't do much fanfare. I find it exciting, most exciting than anything else in the past decade and it s already usable , not a promise 10 years down the road.

fullshark 4y ago
Wait, Cloud computing is a failure or something that didn't live up to the hype in your eyes?
- seydor 4y ago
  overhyped, not a failure
  - angryasian 4y ago
    honestly thats a weird take. IMO its one of the greatest transformations in the last 20 years.
    - seydor 4y ago
      But is it better?
      - angryasian 4y ago
        Its certainly debatable but overall I'd say yes.
dale_glass 4y ago
It depends on at which point. Modern VR started with the Oculus Kickstarter -- it was as nerdy as it gets. Some random nerd nobody had heard of (Palmer Luckey) just had a vision. It was announced on various very nerdy sites (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6172881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6172881). One of the big draws was John Carmack's endorsement. Yeah, later Facebook nabbed them, but before then it was pure nerdy enthusiasm, and to a decent degree it still is. Bitcoin also started in very tight knit, technical circles, part people with libertarian ideals, part cypherpunks, part just random nerds curious about playing with new tech. Today the scene is very, very different.
- rchaud 4y ago
  The end is the same in both cases: Oculus and Bitcoin in their "indie" phases were both insignificant, i.e. not adopted enough to cause problems for the wider world. Once both were co-opted by parties with enormous amounts of capital, both diverted heavily from their original missions. Oculus is now a tool for Zuck's Second Life clone, and Bitcoin has never been further away from being used as an actual currency.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Yeah, and? Pretty much nobody gets to change the world as a normal person. Most things/people either stay at local notoriety, or get adopted by various large entities which then do the world-wide lifting. Eg, when we think about AI art, we're not thinking about the CompVis group at LMU Munich, we're thinking about DALL-E, Midjourney and NovelAI.

fullshark 4y ago

Autonomous driving continues to make progress and pretty much every consumer device being like smart TVs which collect telemetry data whether you want them to or not still seems inevitable to me.

yreg 4y ago

>Non-tech people getting very excited about it and constantly babbling about how this is a great My experience is the opposite. Non-techy people are unimpressed. If they want to see an image of a dragon, they can put the word in Google Image Search and get just that, so what's so special about Stable Diffusion? Meanwhile, (to paraphrase a comment I read on this website) many of us, techy people still cannot pick our jaws from the floor since April when Dalle2 was introduced. Of course, it's fine to be not-interested and I get how annoying the current hn discussions must be for some.

willsmith72 4y ago
Yep this matches my experience too. Me showing non tech people so far is a bit of a let down, at least for a few minutes until they understand better what they could do with it
- gibspaulding 4y ago
  Same here. I've been showing it to my computer science students and most of my freshmen seem pretty uninterested, but my more advanced students had a much stronger reaction. I also found that my students tended to suggest really simple prompts at first which don't really show off what the tech is actually capable of. I've had to help a lot by adding more stipulations or details to their prompts to get a response that actually got their attention.
ggrelet 4y ago
I got my dad to request an André Derain style painting of a cowboy riding a dodo bird. That image most probably didn't exist anywhere before the prompt. I can say the excitement was really real when the output came out! You just have to guide non-tech people into what the tool can do.
CSMastermind 4y ago
AI definitely falls into the category of business people asking me to use it in our technology. A couple of weeks ago I had to write out how we could leverage AI/ML in our software in spite of the fact that we have a mountain of problems that they aren't a good fit for to get through first. The last time I remember the business trying to force specific technologies into products like this was the blockchain craze of around 2017.

nwsm 4y ago

In the case of AI writing and art it seems to be exclusively tech people interested in it. Chat bots have existed in some form for decades so normal people are not impressed, and those interested in writing or art strongly dislike it for several reasons.

marban 4y ago
The abysmal experiences with chatbots have burned the floor for the next decade like Crypto has done for fintechs.
- rchaud 4y ago
  I believe the Silicon Valley PC term for these was "conversational commerce".
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Which is a quite informative term, as it precisely describes the very use case none of the users actually want.

amusedcyclist 4y ago

Its so predictable at this point. SV is just such a BS hype machine. There was 1 truly great revolution (the internet + smart phones) and everyone's trying to replicate it to make the big $$$. Its not going to happen. We are now in the steady state till the next truly big thing hits.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pksebben 4y ago
if the Internet is the watermark, I don't see how cell phones make the cut. The Internet democratized and distributed information sharing at scale, and cell phones created the means of economic capture of that technology (I believe this to be a massive regression). Oh, and we had significantly less planned obsolescence prior to the cell phone era, although that could just be coincidence.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Cell phones enable computing-related activity (ecommerce, email/IM), without requiring the overhead of knowing how to use a computer (or being able to afford one). In the developed world, smartphones brought a generation of boomers online, people who went their entire careers without regular use of a computer terminal. In the developing world, the smartphone was the first computing device for many people.
fullshark 4y ago
Well the original revolution was the one with silicon.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

While I agree with you and other commenter, putting all in the same basket is not really fair. Shitcoins were shitcoins from the start and it hasn't changed. Real quantum computers will take decades to construct as it's an engineering problem. But it doesn't prevent us to play with the existing hardware, using the available tricks to reduce noise etc. and get the feeling of how it could be useful. Crypto (as in cryptocoins, not cryptography) was an interesting idea that was turned into a Ponzi scheme. Still, one day when the dust settles, maybe somebody will construct a reasonable alternative immune to the mistakes made in the past (well, I doubt it, but life taught me nothing is impossible). Autonomous driving got overhyped and irresponsible companies driven by greed started to send on the streets vehicles that weren't 100% ready for the task. I believe we will see AD one day, but I don't believe it will happen very soon. IoT is basically everywhere, maybe we're not using that name any longer, maybe "smart" sounds better. Try buying a consumer TV without it. VR is a very interesting tech development for certain niches and I'm happy it's being developed even though I can't stand 5 minutes in the current hardware. I believe there are many advantages of such a solution, but probably just a fraction of what Meta marketing department says - their proposals are simply ridiculous. The cloud is similarly everywhere. All significant hosting providers started providing cloud services. Maybe marketers try to deliberately make the term fuzzier, but from the technical point of view it's an amalgamation of technologies for managing virtual machines spanning over multiple physical servers - and that's incredibly useful.

quonn 4y ago

Both are actually making progress, it just took longer.

verdenti 4y ago

Vermeulen 4y ago

it's weird seeing IoT as if that was all hype then died off - I literally have 30 or so devices in my home that are Wifi connected (lights, smart speakers...). Like a lot of other hyped technologies it was in the news initially, didn't come as fast as commenters thought, then slowly built up to actually fulfill it's promise. Autonomous driving likely the same