6 ms·

AI Hype Is Cooling – New survey

99 points by zer0tonin 2y ago

cj 2y ago
I'm the "IT guy" at our 30 person startup. My 2024 stance is "buy every AI add-on and decide whether to keep it next year" So our team has access to Enterprise ChatGPT, Gemini, Notion AI, Slack AI, and basically every AI add-on in every SaaS platform that offers it as an upsell (Github Copilot, ReadMe AI, etc). 2024 is the year of "I don't know what the hell these AI tools are going to be useful for, so let's buy them all" 2025 will be the year of "Ok, we spent $xxx on all these AI tools last year, is anyone actually using them?" I predict we'll be canceling a lot of those subscriptions. Which all in cost us over $100/mo per employee.
- seattleeng 2y ago
  This is exactly how Ive seen things occur. It makes a lot of sense, given some tools are great new additions (coding especially), but others fall flat (IMO, search)
- fsndz 2y ago
  that's a nice strategy for a 39 person startup ! using the tools is indeed the only way to see what works and what doesn't.
- rollinDyno 2y ago
  This makes sense for the current add-on wave but expect the launch of independent AI platforms to increase in the coming year.
  - threeseed 2y ago
    I don't think this will happen whilst GPUs are so expensive and constrained. You need to be extremely well capitalised and have a good answer about how to compete against the cloud providers as well as OpenAI, Anthropic etc.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  That's a nice idea but it sounds like you must be spending far above $100/m. Back of the envelope suggests you might be spending the equivalent of an additional salary, and in many companies that's a hard thing to justify without any proven value.
  - bfdm 2y ago
    100/mo per employee, it says. Roughly 3k/mo, or 36k annualized.
    - danpalmer 2y ago
      It says "over $100/m", but these addons are all $10-20 USD each, and it implies more than the list. With just a few of the common ones it's easy to reach $125/m and the approach seems to be to get all of them. Up to $200 is quite likely. That would be 72k USD which is a salary. Admittedly not a software engineer salary, but a significantly above average US salary. Selling the idea of getting another employee is a big deal for most businesses of 30 people.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        I think most 30-person businesses would spend $72k in “R&D” if the promise of such investment is deemed worthy
    - red-iron-pine 2y ago
      36k in a small company is a non-trivial operating expense, esp. for hype-based tools that won't live there tomorrow. like, it's a rounding error as IT budgets go, but throwing a bunch of money at something that's already considered dubious is silly. That's 36k in bonuses for Juniors, or a X-Mas party, licenses for software that you'll actually use.
  - djbusby 2y ago
    Exactly their point. 2024 is the experiment (which costs money) 2025 is the pick the winners and drop the losers. And use money for a different experiment.
- generic92034 2y ago
  Someone in the company also might start to ask where the productivity explosion is.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  That sounds great. Where I work, the CIO has blocked access to all AI for "security reasons". Any advice on how to counter that claim? I don't even know how to approach it. It feels like a freight company refusing to use the new "train" for shipping because they are loud and big and scary.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Why? That seems like a sensible take tbh. You don’t want some other company having chat logs with all your internal code and strategic documents inside.
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      Well we already use all sorts of third parties that have all of our data. Do you think Microsoft should be trusted more than OpenAI? Honest question.
      - adastra22 2y ago
        OpenAI by default includes transcripts in its training data. You have to explicitly opt out (and trust that the op out actually does anything). I wouldn’t trust that everyone correctly opts out. If they don’t, the X months from now “tell me about Foo company’s strategic plans” could regurgitate their internal docs.
        bongodongobob 2y ago
        Even if we don't opt out, it's not plaintext data right? Further, I feel like it's likely to be the tokenized version right? And as far as strategic plans, I don't think it regurgitates novel, one source information does it? Isn't the regurgitation more like boilerplate, seen many times type stuff? Has anyone actually been able to prompt a password out of an LLM? That kind of thing should be ignored because it's high entropy and rare afaik. For example, my name is bongodongobob and my password=hunter17. Do you really think someone will be able to pull this fact out of an LLM at some point? That doesn't seem to be the way they work as I understand it.
fsndz 2y ago
I am not surprised at all. The excitement is receding in accordance with the hype cycle theory. People tried the tools and saw their worth and the limitations. This is actually good news, it means we are entering a moment of truth, a moment when transforming knowledge into productivity and profits becomes crucial ! (https://www.lycee.ai/blog/large-language-models-productivity-and-profits https://www.lycee.ai/blog/large-language-models-productivity...)
- ghaff 2y ago
  I sort of hate the Gartner hype cycle as a research tool but I think there's a lot of truth to it directionally.
  - fsndz 2y ago
    absolutely, directionally it is useful.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  "first there is a massive market. then there is no market. then there is a market"
voidfunc 2y ago
The big winner for AI at the end of the day is going to be Microsoft and Microsoft-like companies that can integrate AI and Copilots into existing tools, with an understanding of how those tools are used by daily users and without significantly increasing prices. The rest of it? Mostly useless.
- hipadev23 2y ago
  Incumbents (Google, Microsoft, Adobe) seem to broadly struggle at reasonable integration of AI. Just look at windows/github copilot compared claude desktop or cursor.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    The rub is that the last-mile owners (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook) can afford to ship last and still win. Do people not use Apple Maps because it came out years after Google Maps?
  - pphysch 2y ago
    Huh? I would assume incumbent GitHub Copilot has way more (paying) users than all of Anthropic's B2C products combined. Is that wrong?
    - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
      A recent report had OpenAI and Athropic's API revenues as roughly equal, but OpenAI having considerably more chat subscriber revenue.
      - famouswaffles 2y ago
        Copilot almost certainly won't be using Open AI's APIs though.
  - Dudelander 2y ago
    I'm kind of shocked by this comment. Microsoft seems to be dominating the industry, with copilot having over 1.5 million users.
asdev 2y ago
who is actually making sustainable revenue solving a real problem using AI? I can only think of the foundational models(OpenAI, Gemini etc), coding helpers(Cursor, GH Copilot)
- cadence- 2y ago
  It might not always be possible to directly translate it to revenue, but in my company, we started using an RAG system to help the Customer Support team answer inquiries. It replaced the old Knowledge Base articles search system, and it improved the number of processed inquiries by about 30%. This decreased customer support times and probably helped make customers happier, which is a pretty nice win, even if it would be pretty much impossible to attribute any revenue numbers directly to it.
  - asdev 2y ago
    is this custom built or are you using a third party system that integrates with Zendesk, Intercom etc?
    - cadence- 2y ago
      It's a custom-built Slack bot that uses our KB articles, and previous customer tickets, to formulate responses and find links to relevant data. Our Customer Service staff uses those generated responses to write actual replies to customers. We currently don't have plans to let the system respond to customer queries directly.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    So a really knowledgeable, specific search engine without ads or a customer base. I hope you don’t pay for that service, you could train and run it yourself in… a week?
  - soco 2y ago
    My experience says, soon there will be a reduction in the company of the customer support jobs, bringing the customer satisfaction on par to before aka lower, but with slightly more money in the shareholders' pockets.
cadence- 2y ago
It's nice to see that the hype is cooling. There will be more room to focus discussions on what's actually useful, and stop with the endless "I love it", vs. "I hate it", vs. "I fear it" discussions.
gradus_ad 2y ago
The only AI product I've found to be useful is ChatGPT and the like. Just chatting it up with a GPT, exploring ideas, getting feedback etc. All derivative products, including coding tools, have been unhelpful at best and actively harmful to productivity at worst.
- dmafreezone 2y ago
  ChatGPT is also frequently incorrect. It becomes obvious in some cases, particularly in areas you are an expert in. Reminds me of a PG essay about a "Dunning-Kruger pass". [0] When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain. [0] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html To some extent we have already developed some filtering against Reddit et al to protect our bayesian priors, but many who lack those filters could suffer greatly from encountering the internet.
drcode 2y ago
Companies are hiring fewer people that understand a technology that enable companies to hire fewer people- News at 11.
bossyTeacher 2y ago
I am calling it. GPT-5 if it ever comes out will be the first sign to the layman and outsiders that we are officially and unambiguously on the downwards stage of the hype cycle. I don't see OpenAI and DeepMind going anyware but I suspect all the API wrapper companies will disappear in 2025
- vrosas 2y ago
  The API wrapper companies will likely limp along until the model market consolidates and they get their faces ripped off by skyrocketing prices, or the features they're selling get integrated into models/platforms themselves. I don't see why Zoom/Google Meet can't integrate a bot-less call recorder+summarizer and immediately put half of them out of business.
  - korkybuchek 2y ago
    > I don't see why Zoom/Google Meet can't integrate a bot-less call recorder+summarizer and immediately put half of them out of business. Zoom at least has had this feature for a while on enterprise plans.
- Wheatman 2y ago
  Well uh, I dont know if this is bad news or good news but GPT-5 might never be released, their "Orion" model seems to be barely better if not worse than GPT-4. Here:https://the-decoder.com/openais-new-orion-model-reportedly-shows-small-gains-over-gpt-4/ https://the-decoder.com/openais-new-orion-model-reportedly-s...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
m3kw9 2y ago
It’s cooling but that’s because the next APi for flagship models haven’t shipped in a while. Every frontier co is on their .5 gen right now.
- threeseed 2y ago
  There have been rumours [1] coming out from one of top frontier companies that they have a hit a wall with the existing technology. They simply can't just throw more data at the problem and expect generational advances. Which means just like the last ML/AI/DS hype cycles we will be going through a winter until the next research breakthrough is invented. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1go6dq1/a_leak_from_a_second_frontier_lab_stating_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1go6dq1/a_leak...
  - m3kw9 2y ago
    I never put much stock on internet rumours. Way too much noise to waste time on it.
    - Wheatman 2y ago
      Well, apparently it has ended up being true. The orion model underperformed expectations by a lot, and even fell beh8nd chatgpt-4 in programing tasks.
saomcomrad56 2y ago
Just in time for crypto hype season!
dmezzetti 2y ago
trough of disillusionment?
debacle 2y ago
Maybe part of the problem is most of the people claiming to be "AI experts" are riding the wave but don't really have much to offer. My company was recently offered a $5k/mo package that would "supercharge our sales with AI." I don't think the presenter had anything material to offer besides some very basic workflow integrations that anyone who is using AI in their day to day has (mostly) already identified.
Apocryphon 2y ago
So... what becomes of the tech industry when we run out of hype fads? Two more years of stagnant hiring? It's good that interest rates are starting to lower again, at least.
- threeseed 2y ago
  a16z are pushing that the Trump presidency will ignite a new wave of VC-led crypto growth. Exactly what we've all been wanting.
aegypti 2y ago
Did anything novel ever come out of people integrating on demand UI into chat & conversations, or is it still in a sort of “low-code” use case space?
- coldtea 2y ago
  A lot of yachts were bought by AI vendors, does that count for a novel development?
MBCook 2y ago
The sad thing is all the damage it’s done in the meantime. I just saw a mention about how a homework help company called Chegg has had their stock drop 99% because everyone is just using ChatGPT. They were a real functioning company, with hundreds or thousands of employees and contractors. All of whom are basically going to be laid off because some company burned through a bunch of VC money to lure everyone away with “the new thing“. All the artists who lost jobs or commissions. All the companies who ended up wasting a ton of time trying to build AI or integrate AI features that aren’t actually useful. And maybe they’ll end up in a product in two years and by then no one will care or want them. All the electricity, the silicon, the water for cooling, the new data center is being built that won’t be needed. Just tons and tons of waste everywhere. ChatGPT is neat. For all we know we’re near a local maxima of what we’re capable of achieving without another completely new approach that will take 10 or 15 years to figure out. There’s no proof that the acceleration and capabilities we’ve seen over the last 2 to 3 years will continue like that. I know my company has been asked about adding AI into The main product I work on. I don’t see any benefit. I’ve been told when they ask the customers what it would do for them, they can’t say either. But they seem to have been trained to ask for it by the hype. Remind me of all the nonsense about chat bots being integrated into every company’s webpage five or six years ago. They’re not helpful. But they were the thing. ChatGPT has some uses, but is also way more expensive/wasteful. I hope the hype moves on fast. I’d like this stuff that shakes out to stick around but what’s going on right now is just way too wasteful for my taste. Feels like almost everyone is trying to build the biggest Z-Ray they can because they’ve been told it’s an amazing discover. No one actually knows what it is, or how to build one, but that hasn’t stopped trillions of dollars from being poured into it. And if we get there, it may not be worth anywhere near what was paid.
- xtreme 2y ago
  Chegg wasn't a victim — it was a middleman profiting from locked-up educational content and exploiting students’ needs. ChatGPT didn't "lure" users; it provided a superior, accessible alternative, democratizing learning rather than hiding it behind paywalls. The argument against AI due to resource usage is selectively blind to the inefficiencies of legacy systems like Chegg. Calling this hype is like dismissing the internet as a fad — it’s a failure of imagination. Disruption always displaces incumbents, but clinging to outdated, exploitative models is far worse than embracing a tool that genuinely empowers users.
bayareacommie 2y ago
[dead]
ratedgene 2y ago
To be honest, AI is very much still in its discovery/explore phase.
- disqard 2y ago
  Is that also the "F*** Around" phase? IMO, the "Find Out" is at least 1-2 years away.
kylecazar 2y ago
The hype is self-fulfilling. We say it's going to drastically impact everything, and then we rush to build it into our products and slap it all over the marketing materials. Enough people do this simultaneously, and it's drastically impacted everything.
- stephen_g 2y ago
  Yes, but it's drastically impacted everything in a different way that was promised... It was supposed to be revolutionary, to usher in whole new unheard-of levels of productivity, but at the end of the day the experience with a lot of these AI tack-ons for a lot of end-users is that they haven't been very useful...
neilv 2y ago
> Nearly half (48%) of all desk workers would be uncomfortable admitting to their manager that they used AI for common workplace tasks. The top reasons for workers’ discomfort are 1) feeling like using AI is cheating 2) fear of being seen as less competent and 3) fear of being seen as lazy First, I love that so many are uncomfortable, and that there are limits to the LLM cheating frenzy. Second, I wonder whether there are additional big reasons (perhaps conflated with the above reasons): * Not wanting to be seen as performing low quality work. * Not wanting to suggest that their job can be replaced by AI tools. * Not wanting to get caught leaking company IP or client/customer/partner data to various services. * Not wanting to attract attention to possible copyright infringement or plagiarism scandal by LLM or other model (whether the company has rules about that, or not).
- userbinator 2y ago
  2) fear of being seen as less competent Guess how you'll be seen when you get called out for pretending an AI hallucination was your own work. I've seen it happen a few times already.
hi_hi 2y ago
The problem for me with all these HypeTech's is they appear to promise something valuable that is always just out of reach. With Crypto it was the idea of micro payments. I want to pay to read news articles, or watch a movie, or tip someone I value online, but I don't want to sign up to some monthly subscription or give over my card details. It seemed to offer a viable alternative to the advertising economy which drives everything now. With LLMs it was the idea that I no longer have to trawl through marketing websites or endless social media posts to find the nugget of information I'm interested in. As a dev, I shouldn't have to care about responsive designs or tech stacks or accessibility or versions of node libraries, all to provide a website. Instead just pump the data directly to the AI and call it a day. The 2 concepts could even work together so my "original thoughts" can be monetised so I can be paid royalties for my "art", like musicians are today.
- davidclark 2y ago
  > As a dev, I shouldn't have to care about responsive designs or tech stacks or accessibility or versions of node libraries, all to provide a website. This sounds like, “As a carpenter, I shouldn’t have to care about types of wood, or saws, or cuts, or ergonomics, all to make a chair.”
  - geoduck14 2y ago
    >This sounds like, “As a carpenter, I shouldn’t have to care about types of wood, or saws, or cuts, or ergonomics, all to make a chair.” I've sat on plenty of couches where the person who made it didn't care - so there is probably a world where this makes sense
  - hi_hi 2y ago
    Nope, thats not the point I was trying to make. What if you weren't making a chair, but a hammock. They can both do the same thing, but are very different approaches and requirements. Same with websites. They are a medium for conveying information. You don't need (traditional) websites or apps to do that. I can even ask for information and receive information completely independently of a website. The only reason devs need to care about all these things is because of the medium being used.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
desireco42 2y ago
I don't think it is at all, it is just shaping into different forms. A lot of AI solutions are trivial still and we are long way from sophisticated ones. I think people affected, which is most of us, are really hurting and want this to be true.
ethbr1 2y ago
At the end of the day, AI is integration. If it's not grounded in the right, updated contexts or provided tools to interact with the apps a user cares about... it's a glorified chatbot. I expect what we'll see in the next 5 years for enterprise adoption is progress on both those fronts. And by progress, I mean "supports interactions with that VB 6 app that's still a critical piece of a company's workflow." (Or SAP, Salesforce, Epic, etc.)
xnx 2y ago
NVDA stock seems like a reasonable proxy for measuring AI hype. I'm not seeing cooling right now.

99 points by zer0tonin 2y ago

cj 2y ago

I'm the "IT guy" at our 30 person startup. My 2024 stance is "buy every AI add-on and decide whether to keep it next year" So our team has access to Enterprise ChatGPT, Gemini, Notion AI, Slack AI, and basically every AI add-on in every SaaS platform that offers it as an upsell (Github Copilot, ReadMe AI, etc). 2024 is the year of "I don't know what the hell these AI tools are going to be useful for, so let's buy them all" 2025 will be the year of "Ok, we spent $xxx on all these AI tools last year, is anyone actually using them?" I predict we'll be canceling a lot of those subscriptions. Which all in cost us over $100/mo per employee.

seattleeng 2y ago
This is exactly how Ive seen things occur. It makes a lot of sense, given some tools are great new additions (coding especially), but others fall flat (IMO, search)
fsndz 2y ago
that's a nice strategy for a 39 person startup ! using the tools is indeed the only way to see what works and what doesn't.
rollinDyno 2y ago
This makes sense for the current add-on wave but expect the launch of independent AI platforms to increase in the coming year.
- threeseed 2y ago
  I don't think this will happen whilst GPUs are so expensive and constrained. You need to be extremely well capitalised and have a good answer about how to compete against the cloud providers as well as OpenAI, Anthropic etc.
danpalmer 2y ago
That's a nice idea but it sounds like you must be spending far above $100/m. Back of the envelope suggests you might be spending the equivalent of an additional salary, and in many companies that's a hard thing to justify without any proven value.
- bfdm 2y ago
  100/mo per employee, it says. Roughly 3k/mo, or 36k annualized.
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    It says "over $100/m", but these addons are all $10-20 USD each, and it implies more than the list. With just a few of the common ones it's easy to reach $125/m and the approach seems to be to get all of them. Up to $200 is quite likely. That would be 72k USD which is a salary. Admittedly not a software engineer salary, but a significantly above average US salary. Selling the idea of getting another employee is a big deal for most businesses of 30 people.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      I think most 30-person businesses would spend $72k in “R&D” if the promise of such investment is deemed worthy
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    36k in a small company is a non-trivial operating expense, esp. for hype-based tools that won't live there tomorrow. like, it's a rounding error as IT budgets go, but throwing a bunch of money at something that's already considered dubious is silly. That's 36k in bonuses for Juniors, or a X-Mas party, licenses for software that you'll actually use.
- djbusby 2y ago
  Exactly their point. 2024 is the experiment (which costs money) 2025 is the pick the winners and drop the losers. And use money for a different experiment.
generic92034 2y ago
Someone in the company also might start to ask where the productivity explosion is.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bongodongobob 2y ago
That sounds great. Where I work, the CIO has blocked access to all AI for "security reasons". Any advice on how to counter that claim? I don't even know how to approach it. It feels like a freight company refusing to use the new "train" for shipping because they are loud and big and scary.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Why? That seems like a sensible take tbh. You don’t want some other company having chat logs with all your internal code and strategic documents inside.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    Well we already use all sorts of third parties that have all of our data. Do you think Microsoft should be trusted more than OpenAI? Honest question.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      OpenAI by default includes transcripts in its training data. You have to explicitly opt out (and trust that the op out actually does anything). I wouldn’t trust that everyone correctly opts out. If they don’t, the X months from now “tell me about Foo company’s strategic plans” could regurgitate their internal docs.
      - bongodongobob 2y ago
        Even if we don't opt out, it's not plaintext data right? Further, I feel like it's likely to be the tokenized version right? And as far as strategic plans, I don't think it regurgitates novel, one source information does it? Isn't the regurgitation more like boilerplate, seen many times type stuff? Has anyone actually been able to prompt a password out of an LLM? That kind of thing should be ignored because it's high entropy and rare afaik. For example, my name is bongodongobob and my password=hunter17. Do you really think someone will be able to pull this fact out of an LLM at some point? That doesn't seem to be the way they work as I understand it.

fsndz 2y ago

I am not surprised at all. The excitement is receding in accordance with the hype cycle theory. People tried the tools and saw their worth and the limitations. This is actually good news, it means we are entering a moment of truth, a moment when transforming knowledge into productivity and profits becomes crucial ! (https://www.lycee.ai/blog/large-language-models-productivity-and-profits https://www.lycee.ai/blog/large-language-models-productivity...)

ghaff 2y ago
I sort of hate the Gartner hype cycle as a research tool but I think there's a lot of truth to it directionally.
- fsndz 2y ago
  absolutely, directionally it is useful.
red-iron-pine 2y ago
"first there is a massive market. then there is no market. then there is a market"

voidfunc 2y ago

The big winner for AI at the end of the day is going to be Microsoft and Microsoft-like companies that can integrate AI and Copilots into existing tools, with an understanding of how those tools are used by daily users and without significantly increasing prices. The rest of it? Mostly useless.

hipadev23 2y ago
Incumbents (Google, Microsoft, Adobe) seem to broadly struggle at reasonable integration of AI. Just look at windows/github copilot compared claude desktop or cursor.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  The rub is that the last-mile owners (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook) can afford to ship last and still win. Do people not use Apple Maps because it came out years after Google Maps?
- pphysch 2y ago
  Huh? I would assume incumbent GitHub Copilot has way more (paying) users than all of Anthropic's B2C products combined. Is that wrong?
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    A recent report had OpenAI and Athropic's API revenues as roughly equal, but OpenAI having considerably more chat subscriber revenue.
    - famouswaffles 2y ago
      Copilot almost certainly won't be using Open AI's APIs though.
- Dudelander 2y ago
  I'm kind of shocked by this comment. Microsoft seems to be dominating the industry, with copilot having over 1.5 million users.

asdev 2y ago

who is actually making sustainable revenue solving a real problem using AI? I can only think of the foundational models(OpenAI, Gemini etc), coding helpers(Cursor, GH Copilot)

cadence- 2y ago
It might not always be possible to directly translate it to revenue, but in my company, we started using an RAG system to help the Customer Support team answer inquiries. It replaced the old Knowledge Base articles search system, and it improved the number of processed inquiries by about 30%. This decreased customer support times and probably helped make customers happier, which is a pretty nice win, even if it would be pretty much impossible to attribute any revenue numbers directly to it.
- asdev 2y ago
  is this custom built or are you using a third party system that integrates with Zendesk, Intercom etc?
  - cadence- 2y ago
    It's a custom-built Slack bot that uses our KB articles, and previous customer tickets, to formulate responses and find links to relevant data. Our Customer Service staff uses those generated responses to write actual replies to customers. We currently don't have plans to let the system respond to customer queries directly.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  So a really knowledgeable, specific search engine without ads or a customer base. I hope you don’t pay for that service, you could train and run it yourself in… a week?
- soco 2y ago
  My experience says, soon there will be a reduction in the company of the customer support jobs, bringing the customer satisfaction on par to before aka lower, but with slightly more money in the shareholders' pockets.

cadence- 2y ago

It's nice to see that the hype is cooling. There will be more room to focus discussions on what's actually useful, and stop with the endless "I love it", vs. "I hate it", vs. "I fear it" discussions.

gradus_ad 2y ago

The only AI product I've found to be useful is ChatGPT and the like. Just chatting it up with a GPT, exploring ideas, getting feedback etc. All derivative products, including coding tools, have been unhelpful at best and actively harmful to productivity at worst.

dmafreezone 2y ago
ChatGPT is also frequently incorrect. It becomes obvious in some cases, particularly in areas you are an expert in. Reminds me of a PG essay about a "Dunning-Kruger pass". [0] When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain. [0] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html To some extent we have already developed some filtering against Reddit et al to protect our bayesian priors, but many who lack those filters could suffer greatly from encountering the internet.

drcode 2y ago

Companies are hiring fewer people that understand a technology that enable companies to hire fewer people- News at 11.

bossyTeacher 2y ago

I am calling it. GPT-5 if it ever comes out will be the first sign to the layman and outsiders that we are officially and unambiguously on the downwards stage of the hype cycle. I don't see OpenAI and DeepMind going anyware but I suspect all the API wrapper companies will disappear in 2025

vrosas 2y ago
The API wrapper companies will likely limp along until the model market consolidates and they get their faces ripped off by skyrocketing prices, or the features they're selling get integrated into models/platforms themselves. I don't see why Zoom/Google Meet can't integrate a bot-less call recorder+summarizer and immediately put half of them out of business.
- korkybuchek 2y ago
  > I don't see why Zoom/Google Meet can't integrate a bot-less call recorder+summarizer and immediately put half of them out of business. Zoom at least has had this feature for a while on enterprise plans.
Wheatman 2y ago
Well uh, I dont know if this is bad news or good news but GPT-5 might never be released, their "Orion" model seems to be barely better if not worse than GPT-4. Here:https://the-decoder.com/openais-new-orion-model-reportedly-shows-small-gains-over-gpt-4/ https://the-decoder.com/openais-new-orion-model-reportedly-s...

deleted 2y ago

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m3kw9 2y ago

It’s cooling but that’s because the next APi for flagship models haven’t shipped in a while. Every frontier co is on their .5 gen right now.

threeseed 2y ago
There have been rumours [1] coming out from one of top frontier companies that they have a hit a wall with the existing technology. They simply can't just throw more data at the problem and expect generational advances. Which means just like the last ML/AI/DS hype cycles we will be going through a winter until the next research breakthrough is invented. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1go6dq1/a_leak_from_a_second_frontier_lab_stating_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1go6dq1/a_leak...
- m3kw9 2y ago
  I never put much stock on internet rumours. Way too much noise to waste time on it.
  - Wheatman 2y ago
    Well, apparently it has ended up being true. The orion model underperformed expectations by a lot, and even fell beh8nd chatgpt-4 in programing tasks.

saomcomrad56 2y ago

Just in time for crypto hype season!

dmezzetti 2y ago

trough of disillusionment?

debacle 2y ago

Maybe part of the problem is most of the people claiming to be "AI experts" are riding the wave but don't really have much to offer. My company was recently offered a $5k/mo package that would "supercharge our sales with AI." I don't think the presenter had anything material to offer besides some very basic workflow integrations that anyone who is using AI in their day to day has (mostly) already identified.

Apocryphon 2y ago

So... what becomes of the tech industry when we run out of hype fads? Two more years of stagnant hiring? It's good that interest rates are starting to lower again, at least.

threeseed 2y ago
a16z are pushing that the Trump presidency will ignite a new wave of VC-led crypto growth. Exactly what we've all been wanting.

aegypti 2y ago

Did anything novel ever come out of people integrating on demand UI into chat & conversations, or is it still in a sort of “low-code” use case space?

coldtea 2y ago
A lot of yachts were bought by AI vendors, does that count for a novel development?

MBCook 2y ago

The sad thing is all the damage it’s done in the meantime. I just saw a mention about how a homework help company called Chegg has had their stock drop 99% because everyone is just using ChatGPT. They were a real functioning company, with hundreds or thousands of employees and contractors. All of whom are basically going to be laid off because some company burned through a bunch of VC money to lure everyone away with “the new thing“. All the artists who lost jobs or commissions. All the companies who ended up wasting a ton of time trying to build AI or integrate AI features that aren’t actually useful. And maybe they’ll end up in a product in two years and by then no one will care or want them. All the electricity, the silicon, the water for cooling, the new data center is being built that won’t be needed. Just tons and tons of waste everywhere. ChatGPT is neat. For all we know we’re near a local maxima of what we’re capable of achieving without another completely new approach that will take 10 or 15 years to figure out. There’s no proof that the acceleration and capabilities we’ve seen over the last 2 to 3 years will continue like that. I know my company has been asked about adding AI into The main product I work on. I don’t see any benefit. I’ve been told when they ask the customers what it would do for them, they can’t say either. But they seem to have been trained to ask for it by the hype. Remind me of all the nonsense about chat bots being integrated into every company’s webpage five or six years ago. They’re not helpful. But they were the thing. ChatGPT has some uses, but is also way more expensive/wasteful. I hope the hype moves on fast. I’d like this stuff that shakes out to stick around but what’s going on right now is just way too wasteful for my taste. Feels like almost everyone is trying to build the biggest Z-Ray they can because they’ve been told it’s an amazing discover. No one actually knows what it is, or how to build one, but that hasn’t stopped trillions of dollars from being poured into it. And if we get there, it may not be worth anywhere near what was paid.

xtreme 2y ago
Chegg wasn't a victim — it was a middleman profiting from locked-up educational content and exploiting students’ needs. ChatGPT didn't "lure" users; it provided a superior, accessible alternative, democratizing learning rather than hiding it behind paywalls. The argument against AI due to resource usage is selectively blind to the inefficiencies of legacy systems like Chegg. Calling this hype is like dismissing the internet as a fad — it’s a failure of imagination. Disruption always displaces incumbents, but clinging to outdated, exploitative models is far worse than embracing a tool that genuinely empowers users.

bayareacommie 2y ago

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ratedgene 2y ago

To be honest, AI is very much still in its discovery/explore phase.

disqard 2y ago
Is that also the "F*** Around" phase? IMO, the "Find Out" is at least 1-2 years away.

kylecazar 2y ago

The hype is self-fulfilling. We say it's going to drastically impact everything, and then we rush to build it into our products and slap it all over the marketing materials. Enough people do this simultaneously, and it's drastically impacted everything.

stephen_g 2y ago
Yes, but it's drastically impacted everything in a different way that was promised... It was supposed to be revolutionary, to usher in whole new unheard-of levels of productivity, but at the end of the day the experience with a lot of these AI tack-ons for a lot of end-users is that they haven't been very useful...

neilv 2y ago

> Nearly half (48%) of all desk workers would be uncomfortable admitting to their manager that they used AI for common workplace tasks. The top reasons for workers’ discomfort are 1) feeling like using AI is cheating 2) fear of being seen as less competent and 3) fear of being seen as lazy First, I love that so many are uncomfortable, and that there are limits to the LLM cheating frenzy. Second, I wonder whether there are additional big reasons (perhaps conflated with the above reasons): * Not wanting to be seen as performing low quality work. * Not wanting to suggest that their job can be replaced by AI tools. * Not wanting to get caught leaking company IP or client/customer/partner data to various services. * Not wanting to attract attention to possible copyright infringement or plagiarism scandal by LLM or other model (whether the company has rules about that, or not).

userbinator 2y ago
2) fear of being seen as less competent Guess how you'll be seen when you get called out for pretending an AI hallucination was your own work. I've seen it happen a few times already.

hi_hi 2y ago

The problem for me with all these HypeTech's is they appear to promise something valuable that is always just out of reach. With Crypto it was the idea of micro payments. I want to pay to read news articles, or watch a movie, or tip someone I value online, but I don't want to sign up to some monthly subscription or give over my card details. It seemed to offer a viable alternative to the advertising economy which drives everything now. With LLMs it was the idea that I no longer have to trawl through marketing websites or endless social media posts to find the nugget of information I'm interested in. As a dev, I shouldn't have to care about responsive designs or tech stacks or accessibility or versions of node libraries, all to provide a website. Instead just pump the data directly to the AI and call it a day. The 2 concepts could even work together so my "original thoughts" can be monetised so I can be paid royalties for my "art", like musicians are today.

davidclark 2y ago
> As a dev, I shouldn't have to care about responsive designs or tech stacks or accessibility or versions of node libraries, all to provide a website. This sounds like, “As a carpenter, I shouldn’t have to care about types of wood, or saws, or cuts, or ergonomics, all to make a chair.”
- geoduck14 2y ago
  >This sounds like, “As a carpenter, I shouldn’t have to care about types of wood, or saws, or cuts, or ergonomics, all to make a chair.” I've sat on plenty of couches where the person who made it didn't care - so there is probably a world where this makes sense
- hi_hi 2y ago
  Nope, thats not the point I was trying to make. What if you weren't making a chair, but a hammock. They can both do the same thing, but are very different approaches and requirements. Same with websites. They are a medium for conveying information. You don't need (traditional) websites or apps to do that. I can even ask for information and receive information completely independently of a website. The only reason devs need to care about all these things is because of the medium being used.

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desireco42 2y ago

I don't think it is at all, it is just shaping into different forms. A lot of AI solutions are trivial still and we are long way from sophisticated ones. I think people affected, which is most of us, are really hurting and want this to be true.

ethbr1 2y ago

At the end of the day, AI is integration. If it's not grounded in the right, updated contexts or provided tools to interact with the apps a user cares about... it's a glorified chatbot. I expect what we'll see in the next 5 years for enterprise adoption is progress on both those fronts. And by progress, I mean "supports interactions with that VB 6 app that's still a critical piece of a company's workflow." (Or SAP, Salesforce, Epic, etc.)

xnx 2y ago

NVDA stock seems like a reasonable proxy for measuring AI hype. I'm not seeing cooling right now.