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Whenever I hear the AI hype cycle, I'm always reminded of expert systems and how they were going to revolutionize the world.
by glitchc 2y ago
Whenever I hear the AI hype cycle, I'm always reminded of expert systems and how they were going to revolutionize the world.
- awahab92 2y agothere were probably people who doubted electricity, vaccines and indoor plumbing.
- ryandrake 2y agoThere were also people who doubted the Segway, Magic Leap, Theranos, 3D TVs, Windows Phone, and Google Glass. I think doubt is OK, at least it is before any particular technology or product has actually proven itself.
- fragmede 2y agothe gap between participants in this conversation is that some have had it proven itself for themselves and others around them, and others have not seen that same proof.
- rsynnott 2y agoThing is, that comment would have worked in a thread three years ago about ‘metaverses’. Sometimes, the early adopters are the only adopters. Not saying that’s definitely the case here, but it is looking like it’s going in that direction - huge hype, absurd levels of VC spending, a bunch of ultra-enthusiastic early adopters, but real mainstream application still absent.
- glitchc 2y agoThis is false equivalence and you know better. Electricity is foundational technology. What we call AI are LLMs, which are great and useful, but not in the same league as something foundational like electricity.
- pixl97 2y agoNow, the question of "Are LLMs intelligent" is debatable, but intelligence is foundational itself.
- rurp 2y agoThe ration of hyped technologies that turned out to be overhyped, versus ones that turned out to be as impactful as electricity is... I don't even know how many orders of magnitude different, but it's a lot.
- llm_trw 2y agoYou should also be reminded about the internet. After the dotcom bubble it was extremely common to hear it outright dismissed as never being useful for anything. Sometimes the future just gets here before we're ready for it.
- glitchc 2y agoRepeat after me: An LLM is not AI. The internet enabled a whole new world of possible applications. It's unlikely this or even the next upgrade to ML will get there. If we get to AGI, sure, that's grpund-breaking, but we're still a few steps removed from that.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoRepeat after me: "AI hype" is not like Bitcoin hype, it's like Dot-com boom. Generative models are already changing how people live and work. Ignore the grifters, and ignore the entrepreneurs. Look at civilians, regular folks, and watch how it impacts them.
- glitchc 2y agoOh the belief is so strong! Wouldn't it be great if this were true.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoIt's not hard to have strong beliefs about something that's real.
- pphysch 2y agoTo be fair to Bitcoin, the world's largest economic bloc is actively building an alternative to USD/Western banks for international settlements, with blockchain technology. It doesn't have anything to do with the libertarian vision of BTC but it's the same technical concept.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
- cjbgkagh 2y agoThis really is different, and I say that as someone who spent a lot of time on expert systems, not as someone who is overly bought into AI hype. The problem with expert systems is that even if the tooling was perfect the people using them needed a rather nuanced and sophisticated understanding of ontologies. That just wasn’t going to happen. There is not enough of that kind of expertise to go around. Efforts to train people largely failed. I think the intentional undermining of developer salaries pushed a lot of smart people out of the software industry making the problem even worse. That’s what makes AI special, the ability to deliver value even when used by unsophisticated operators. Many workflows can largely stay the same and AI can be sprinkled in where it makes the most sense. I use it for documentation writing and UI asset production and it’s better in that role than the people I used to pay.