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Definitely a hype cycle at the moment. I am old enough that this is my second ;)
by alex1212 3y ago
Definitely a hype cycle at the moment. I am old enough that this is my second ;)
- hattmall 3y agoSecond hype cycle or second AI hype cycle? If the latter when was the first?
- yxre 3y ago1955 with the advent of the field with some very hopeful mathematicians, but the research never produced anything. 1980 after the foundations of neural networks, but it was too computationally intensive to be useful 2009 with Watson https://www.hiig.de/en/a-brief-history-of-ai-ai-in-the-hype-cycle/ https://www.hiig.de/en/a-brief-history-of-ai-ai-in-the-hype-...
- padolsey 3y agoCould this time be different? The tools are now in the hands of the "masses", not behind closed doors or in lofty ivory towers. People can run this stuff on their laptops etc
- timy2shoes 3y agoEvery time someone says “this time it’s different” (e.g. 1998 internet bubble, 2007 housing bubble, 2020 crypto bubble, etc) time proves that this time was not really that different.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- civilitty 3y ago> (e.g. 1998 internet bubble, 2007 housing bubble, 2020 crypto bubble, etc) That's some extreme cherry picking. During that time period, the internet and smartphones alone have completely changed society (for better and worse) in the span of only three decades, despite the former going causing a minor economic crash in its infancy. Almost everything is different except human nature. The scammers are innovating just like everyone else.
- goatlover 3y agoWhen someone says a technology completely changed society, I think of the hypothetical singularity that Kurzweil and company predict, where it's basically impossible for us to predict what the future looks like after. But when you look back at the world before the rise of the web and then smartphones, it's just taking preexisting technologies and making them available in more mobile formats. TV, radio, satellite and computers existed before then (1968 mother of all demos had word processing, hypertext, networking, online video). And some people did more or less foresee what we've done online since. We still burn fossil fuels to a large extent, still drive but not fly cars, still live on Earth not in space, still die of the same causes, etc. I watch a long cargo train that looks like it's form the 80s go by and wonder how much the internet changed cargo hauling. I'm sure with the logistics the internet made things a lot more efficient, but the actual hauling is not much different. It's not like we teleport things around now. You can order online instead of out of a catalog, but brick stores remain. You can read digital books, but still plenty of printed materials, bookstores, libraries.
- JohnFen 3y ago> the internet and smartphones alone have completely changed society I honestly think this overstates the case pretty severely. They have certainly caused societal change, but from what I can see, society as a whole is not actually all that different from what it was before all of that.
- vikramkr 3y agoWell, of those 3 the 1998 internet bubble actually was different and modern society actually was fundamentally changed by the technology in question, so idk if that's the best counterargument. The other two, sure yeah those amounted to essentially nothing. But there have been plenty of bubbles where the concept underlying the bubble actually did have large societal impacts even if the investors all lost money, like tulipmania with futures contracts and railway mania with trains
- _ea1k 3y agoBut the internet did change things? Even crypto is debatable. BTC still exists and still has pretty high value, just not as high as at its peak. TBH, I'm not sure how to quantify housing bubbles either. I'd bet most of the country has much higher home prices now than in 2007. I bet they were higher than 2007 in most places and most years between then and now too.
- sgift 3y agoCould yes? Will it be? I can tell you when you don't need the answer anymore, i.e. in a few years. It's the very nature of the hype cycle that it is very hard to distinguish from a real thing.
- alex1212 3y agoSpot on, 2009 with Watson was my first. Oh, the memories...It was nowhere near as nuts as this one, at least in my head.
- p1esk 3y agoI don’t remember much happening with NNs in 1980. There was a lot of hype in 1992-1998 though.
- rsynnott 3y agoThere was also a voice recognition thing in the 90s, the whole self-driving car/computer vision thing early to mid last decade, and a _very_ short-lived period when everyone was a chatbot startup in 2016 (I think Microsoft Tay just poured so much cold water over this that it died almost immediately).
- paulddraper 3y agoMachine learning became quite the buzzword in 2016(?)
- alex1212 3y agoI definitely remember it being the "hot thing" in the ad tech space
- ben_w 3y agoI can remember hyped up news after Watson; personally I was hyped up after Creatures (though in my defence I was a teenager and hadn't really encountered non-fictional AI before); before those there was famously the AI winter, following hype that turned out to be unreasonable.
- dspillett 3y agoNot the OP, but I've been through a few AI hype cycles and know of earlier ones, depending on what you count: ML more generally over the last half decade or so¹, the excitement around Watson (and Deep Blue before it), the second big bump in neural network interest in the mid/late 80s², there have been a couple of cycles regarding expert-system-like methods over the decades, etc. -- [1] though that has produced more useful output than some of the previous hype cycles, as I think will the current one as it seemingly already is doing [2] I was barely born for the start of the “AI winter” following the first such hype cycle
- ska 3y agoWikipedia has a summary of some of the earlier history here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
- jvanderbot 3y agoFourth here, if you count dot com, early robotics cum self driving cars, and web 3. Each had their impact, winners and vast array of losers.