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Right now AI is in the part of the hype cycle where we are in the first knee of the S curve and people are drawing straight lines from that to predict the futur

Right now AI is in the part of the hype cycle where we are in the first knee of the S curve and people are drawing straight lines from that to predict the future. I've seen so much ridiculous hype about AI becoming godlike super-geniuses before the decade is out that I have to wonder if any of these people have tried using AI for real work and not just flashy demos.

bloopernova 2y ago
It's just like the hype about self driving vehicles. 5 years ago I had bought into the hype and thought that most long haul truck drivers would be out of work by now.
- gizajob 2y ago
  Funny that isn’t it. I wonder if Tesla throwing $4billion of Nvidia GPUs into a data centre will be enough to solve it “this time”. Self-driving could easily become one of the pins that bursts Nvidias bubble if we don’t see spectacular improvements.
  - jhallenworld 2y ago
    News today (from Nvidia!) was that Tesla isn't getting them, Elon redirected them to his new AI company. The new AI has the same problem as AI for self driving- you can't trust it.
    - gizajob 2y ago
      It's strange alongside, that he's doing it as part of a new company. I realise it's due to his ongoing squabble with Tesla over this $50billion payout he still hasn't had... but can you even imagine the CEO of any other company doing that? CEO: "Hey, so there's this thing about the product that I've been hyping as the killer widget it'll get, ohh for about ten years now. Well, we still didn't manage to solve the widget problem, so I'm going to start a new widget company that I own so I can sell us the widget." Shareholders & Board: "You're doing what??!? That's the most illegal thing we've ever heard!"
paulmd 2y ago
> I've seen so much ridiculous hype about AI becoming godlike super-geniuses before the decade is out I’ve actually seen literally none of that from proponents, like I’ve probably seen 100x as much strawmanning and uncharitable summary from opponents. Essentially nobody thinks we should hand the kingdom over to an unsupervised savior machine, like, can you show me a candidate from a major political party (doesn’t have to be US, but let’s say >10% electoral share) who supports such a platform? Or a ceo who supports moving leadership decisions for his company over to an AI? As far as I can tell, that whole thing is a strawman cut whole-cloth from the imaginations of detractors. I’d be delighted to hear counterexamples of the sort I discussed but I frankly don’t think they really exist outside some feverish imaginations. Everyone just got so busy pointing out that it’s not a good idea that they failed to notice that, in fact, nobody thinks it’s a good idea yet. And it’s a self-reinforcing cycle because obviously there are lot of other people who agree that it is not, in fact, a good idea, so they feel very supported and emboldened to point it out constantly, such that they’ve forgotten that nobody argues that in the first place. I’ll be the one to say it: it isn’t a good idea to grind down the mountains and fill in the oceans and pave over the entire earth’s surface to drive rocket-powered hypercars at unfathomable speeds. Was anyone serious actually proposing that? No, but really you’d have to be crazy to take that position, wouldn’t you? It would be super harmful if we let people just argue unhindered that we should do that. So really it’s a public service, right? Don’t let the crazies grab the wheel, vote against paving the earth.
- jandrese 2y ago
  This chart has been making the rounds recently as an example: https://x.com/tomhfh/status/1798467961151443382 https://x.com/tomhfh/status/1798467961151443382
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    That chart is insane. Assuming that scaling up compute is all that's needed seems wildly incorrect to me. This whole buzz does have shades of self-driving cars back in 2016.
    - 2y ago

bloopernova 2y ago

It's just like the hype about self driving vehicles. 5 years ago I had bought into the hype and thought that most long haul truck drivers would be out of work by now.

gizajob 2y ago
Funny that isn’t it. I wonder if Tesla throwing $4billion of Nvidia GPUs into a data centre will be enough to solve it “this time”. Self-driving could easily become one of the pins that bursts Nvidias bubble if we don’t see spectacular improvements.
- jhallenworld 2y ago
  News today (from Nvidia!) was that Tesla isn't getting them, Elon redirected them to his new AI company. The new AI has the same problem as AI for self driving- you can't trust it.
  - gizajob 2y ago
    It's strange alongside, that he's doing it as part of a new company. I realise it's due to his ongoing squabble with Tesla over this $50billion payout he still hasn't had... but can you even imagine the CEO of any other company doing that? CEO: "Hey, so there's this thing about the product that I've been hyping as the killer widget it'll get, ohh for about ten years now. Well, we still didn't manage to solve the widget problem, so I'm going to start a new widget company that I own so I can sell us the widget." Shareholders & Board: "You're doing what??!? That's the most illegal thing we've ever heard!"

paulmd 2y ago

> I've seen so much ridiculous hype about AI becoming godlike super-geniuses before the decade is out I’ve actually seen literally none of that from proponents, like I’ve probably seen 100x as much strawmanning and uncharitable summary from opponents. Essentially nobody thinks we should hand the kingdom over to an unsupervised savior machine, like, can you show me a candidate from a major political party (doesn’t have to be US, but let’s say >10% electoral share) who supports such a platform? Or a ceo who supports moving leadership decisions for his company over to an AI? As far as I can tell, that whole thing is a strawman cut whole-cloth from the imaginations of detractors. I’d be delighted to hear counterexamples of the sort I discussed but I frankly don’t think they really exist outside some feverish imaginations. Everyone just got so busy pointing out that it’s not a good idea that they failed to notice that, in fact, nobody thinks it’s a good idea yet. And it’s a self-reinforcing cycle because obviously there are lot of other people who agree that it is not, in fact, a good idea, so they feel very supported and emboldened to point it out constantly, such that they’ve forgotten that nobody argues that in the first place. I’ll be the one to say it: it isn’t a good idea to grind down the mountains and fill in the oceans and pave over the entire earth’s surface to drive rocket-powered hypercars at unfathomable speeds. Was anyone serious actually proposing that? No, but really you’d have to be crazy to take that position, wouldn’t you? It would be super harmful if we let people just argue unhindered that we should do that. So really it’s a public service, right? Don’t let the crazies grab the wheel, vote against paving the earth.

jandrese 2y ago
This chart has been making the rounds recently as an example: https://x.com/tomhfh/status/1798467961151443382 https://x.com/tomhfh/status/1798467961151443382
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  That chart is insane. Assuming that scaling up compute is all that's needed seems wildly incorrect to me. This whole buzz does have shades of self-driving cars back in 2016.
  - 2y ago