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> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public. Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is alwa

> The product market fit is fantastic. This isn't the first time I've heard random strangers discussing it in public. Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others . 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on . - self driving has not transformed us into minority report and despite how far it has come it cannot in next 30 years be ubiquitous, even if the l5 magic tech exists today in every new car sold it will take 15 years for current cars to lifecycle. - Crypto has not replaced fiat currency , even in most generous reading you can see it as store of value like gold or whatever useless baubles people assign arbitrary value to, but has no traction for 3 out of other 4 key functions of money . - VR is not transformative to every day life and is 5 fundamental breakthroughs away. - Voice assistants are useless setting alarms and selecting music 10 years in. There has been meaningful and measurable in each of these fields, but none of them have met the high bar of world transforming . AI is aiming for much higher bar of singularity and consciousness. Just in every hype cycles we are in peak of inflated expectations, we will reach a plateau of productivity where it is will be useful in specific areas (as it already is) and people will move on to the next fad.

bee_rider 2y ago
Consciousness is a stupid and unreasonable goal, it is basically impossible to confirm that a machine isn’t just faking it really well. Singularity is at least definable…Although I think it is not really the bar required to be really impactful. If we get an AI system that can do the work of like 60% of hardcore knowledge workers, 80% of office workers, and 95% of CEOs/politicians and other pablumists, it could be really change how the economy works without actually being a singularity.
- deleted 2y ago
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- lupire 2y ago
  Those numbers are approximately zero, because demand will immediately 10x as soon as AI makes that affordable, as computers have always done. So, profitable (if the AI can cost less than a human for the work), but not changing how the economy works
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    If white collar jobs get automated away to the extent that blue collar jobs were in the industrial revolution, that will be, by definition, a massive upheaval of the economy.
ben_w 2y ago
> 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on . I never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself, and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being re-dubbed as a dystopian nightmare. > AI is aiming for much higher bar of singularity and consciousness. No, it's aiming to be economically useful. "The singularity" is what a lot of people think is an automatic consequence of being able to solve tasks related to AI; me, I think that's how we sustained Moore's Law so long (computers designing computers, you can't place a billion transistors by hand, but even if you could the scale is now well into the zone where quantum tunnelling has to be accounted for in the design), and that "singularities" are a sign something is wrong with the model. "Consciousness" has 40 definitions, and is therefore not even a meaningful target. > Just in every hype cycles we are in peak of inflated expectations, we will reach a plateau of productivity where it is will be useful in specific areas (as it already is) and people will move on to the next fad. In that at least, we agree.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  > never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself, and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being re-dubbed as a dystopian nightmare. Isn't that funny? It speaks exactly to the GP's point about how frothing and uninformative the "zeitgeist" can be, as my experience happens to have been the opposite of yours. The people I happened to be casually brushing around during those earlier fads happened to be hip to them, or maybe my ears were more attentive, and so I heard them mentioned more often and with more enthusiasm. In contrast, most of what I happen to hear about generative AI, outside of HN, tends to be idly laughing at its foibles and misrepresentation if it's mentioned at all. I don't expect you to have the same experience as me, but I'm careful not to assume too much based on either of ours.
eastbound 2y ago
Common, VR, NFTs and blockchain were always abysses of void looking for a usecase. Driving cars maybe, but development has been stalling for 15 years.
- manquer 2y ago
  Not to their proponents particularly at the time. For the rest of us in HN it was easier to judge on much mileage will get, but a long time in each cycle we were in the minority, just like the AI skeptics including me and many here are today on how much we will value get. Don’t get are wrong, AI is more real and more useful than the things before it, but everything is on a spectrum of success - some more and some less, but none of it has been or will be world changing or truly global. The true breakthroughs rarely get public or even tech community attention until late in the cycle although their progress is public and can be tracked, like with EUV or mRNA or GLP-1 etc . Others which are incremental changes like 5G or cheaper smartphones do not get as much attention as their impact should warrant especially compared to the fads Hype cycles don’t correlate well with real tech cycles
- ben_w 2y ago
  I'd say VR is just another form factor for games rather than being a void looking for a use-case, but I agree about NFTs and cryptocurrency*. * technically not all blockchains because git and BitTorrent are both also hash trees and therefore non-currency block-chains, but definitely the cryptocurrency uses of them.
  - manquer 2y ago
    The point is not that they are snakeoil and have zero value . Every one of these things have some value in some area of applications. However the hype cycle just as now in AI claimed it will change everything, not hey here is interesting new thing and it is going be used in select applications . Nobody is investing billions and billions on that pitch
tim333 2y ago
>people will move on to the next fad AI isn't really a fad. It's going to something more like electricity, say.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  My favorite comparison right now is to the microwave oven. It's a novel thing. It's not going anywhere. It makes some things easier, sometimes, in both personal and professional settings. But you're not at a big loss without it and in many cases your choice to do without is a choice that favors quality, control, nuance, and skill refinement.
  - tim333 2y ago
    AI probably has more capacity to be incorporated into many things than microwaves.
    - manquer 2y ago
      I will bite, going with your analogy comparing to electricity on the other end of the spectrum. electricity is not ubiquitous in many parts of the global south full 130 years. The common definition is- access to electricity source that can provide very basic lighting, and charge a phone or power a radio for 4 hours per day. Not even grid connected. Even with this basic definition there is still full 660 million people who don’t have access to even that. It only dropped below a billion in 2015. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access You need beyond the basic to be meaningfully transformative, clean cooking fuel access is one proxy used that is still 2Billion people without access for example. Nobody is denying the transformative nature of electricity or say internet , but even these things take a long long time, more than one life time to propagate and be world changing, and not because of their choice of lifestyle to live disconnected. If electricity, clean water, sanitation and nutrition and basic healthcare is not available to half the population, what is AI going to do in next 3- 5 years or whatever ridiculous timeframe Sam Altman keeps talking about . And this is a not productivity problem, there is more than enough food production capacity to feed the world, yet starvation and malnutrition is not solved. AI may rock your world, it is not going to rock the world anytime soon even if was like electricity.
result2vino 2y ago
> 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything Are you so deep in the SV tech echo chamber that you can’t distinguish between tech bro / snake oil salesman hype and something that actual normal people are engaged by? The only people talking about NFTs in a non-disparaging way were delusional in large part because they themselves bought into it wanted to egg others on. NFTs were just a stupid faddish speculative ‘commodity’ market. It’s a completely different thing. Ditto with “blockchain”. That well was positioned by people trying to make money from cryptocurrencies. The mechanics allowed for that. Again, it’s a completely different thing. Civilians with no vested interest weren’t sitting in restaurants singing the praises of decentralised ledgers or monkey pictures on someone’s Google Drive. I assure you. I also assure you that this IS however happening with ChatGPT. Out here in the real world, we see it. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues with LLMs, both philosophically and in therms of their actual output. This doesn’t mean there aren’t the same old SV snake oil salespeople and YouTube wannabes trying to push some BS products and courses. But let’s not pretend for a second like this is usefully comparable to “blockchain” and “NFTs”.
- lupire 2y ago
  Blockchain and NFT took over the Super Bowl. That's pretty mainstream. There are Bitcoin ATMs.
- manquer 2y ago
  I am sorry, every A-List celebrity was shilling a NFT project, from superbowl to other public spheres of discourse seemed all crypto. The future president of the country has a crypto project to sell, I don’t see how much mainstream it can get. Yes, There is close connection to SV hype cycle and what happens in mainstream, most mainstream ones originate in SV but the ones I mentioned specifically impacted the larger public not just SV tech sphere
- lodovic 2y ago
  I think that underestimates public engagements in these hypes. Billions were wasted by "normal" people worldwide on VR headsets, in-game nfts, and shitcoins. Real world money, not some inflated VC capital projections. And while the current LLMs still are an "advanced Eliza", regular people are quite happy to pay for its services.
sneak 2y ago
Did you really just compare the thing that makes me able to code and ship 5x faster to... NFTs?
- manquer 2y ago
  Matter of perspective, Ai tools value depends on your existing skill level and whether it only doing what you already can do and you can correct it very well. However that kind of user in my experience is rare , vast majority are junior developers who do not understand the output well enough and now generate 5x of it that I have to review and they no longer make the effort to understand any foundational concept . This is not new, the rise in popularity of StackOverflow created a class of developers who didn’t want to spend the time to learn properly reading the manual. In itself reducing the skill level needed to be productive is not inherently bad, it was PhD in CS could only program in 70s and 80s. Each generation of tech and abstraction opened up software development to newer class of employees. However the difference is the industry desperately needed expansion each time because PCs became popular or the desktop or mobile devices etc . There was enormous demand for new applications both personal and professional which couldn’t be satisfied with kind of volume CS research programs could fulfill. There is no such transformation currently , there aren’t a new class of users or major applications coming up in a such high volume, that quality drop is compensated by quantity . There is lot more need for higher quality products as software market is plateauing from the highs mobile adoption gave.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > code and ship I notice that doesn't say what happened to the throughput of "diagnose, fix, and reduce technical debt." :p
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  really depends on the kind of AI. If I said I shipped a AI-genned game 5x faster , then people would indeed compare it to NFTs.
DennisP 2y ago
Self-driving won't take over by just being available in the new cars people are buying anyway. It'll take over when people find it cheaper to ride robotaxis than to own a vehicle at all. That's potentially a much quicker transition, requiring significantly fewer new vehicles.
- manquer 2y ago
  Assuming we get to your level of value prop. It will still only be a choice for new first time buyers If I already own a car, for which am paying an emi and no hope of selling for good value (because market is dropping as newest buyers disappear) it won’t make economic sense for me till I generate LTV from the car to switch over . Either way it till take 1-2 decades after ubiquitous L5 availability, even if that was possible at all and soon
  - deleted 2y ago
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- bdangubic 2y ago
  there are already cheaper ways to ride from point A to point B without owning a car (especially in urban areas) and yet car ownership has never been higher… ideal robotaxis will take at least one full generation to actually materialize. just as a silly personal example, I took a car to the shop and got Uber credits. my wife was heading into the city for an event (had to deal with both traffic and parking) and I was like “take a free Uber” and she was like “no way, driving my own car…” my daughter on the other hand…
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  Nobody is going to sit and wait for a robo uber in the suburbs for ten minutes to go to the grocery store ten miles down the road. This is the main problem, America has suburbanised itself to hell and no amount of robo taxis will create the world you are suggesting. And elsewhere in the world there’s no need because most places have adequate public transit which solves the problem way more efficiently than robo taxis ever will.
mlyle 2y ago
> despite how far it has come it cannot in next 30 years be ubiquitous, even if the l5 magic tech exists today in every new car sold it will take 15 years for current cars to lifecycle. We must have a different meaning of ubiquitous. Ubiquitous means "found everywhere" not "has eliminated everything else." You don't even need to cycle the fleet once to meet the definition of ubiquitous. If you can get a self driving car in any city and many towns, you see them all over the place, and a third of trips are done with them, that'd be ubiquitous in my book. I don't see why you couldn't get there in 3 decades. I don't think it's likely in 12 years but it seems possible in that timeframe.
- manquer 2y ago
  I considered fleet change as the transformation that eliminates driving as a needed skill . Getting a slightly better version of Waymo in SF is just augmenting for a poor public transit with a very American car solution . It scales pretty poorly and cannot replace good public transit, at best can augment them as last mile connectivity . There is value to those of course and is disruptive to a sector, it is still a specific use case and not world changing. You are only disrupting the taxi industry not driving itself . The claims at the time was not we are going replace taxis with robotaxis , but driving itself will be a thing of the past. That is the nature of hype cycles .
famouswaffles 2y ago
Comparing the site that was #8 in Internet worldwide traffic last month, has 300M weekly active users, 1B messages a day and is basically the fastest adopted software product in history to NFTs, VR and Blockchain does not make any sense.

bee_rider 2y ago

Consciousness is a stupid and unreasonable goal, it is basically impossible to confirm that a machine isn’t just faking it really well. Singularity is at least definable…Although I think it is not really the bar required to be really impactful. If we get an AI system that can do the work of like 60% of hardcore knowledge workers, 80% of office workers, and 95% of CEOs/politicians and other pablumists, it could be really change how the economy works without actually being a singularity.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lupire 2y ago
Those numbers are approximately zero, because demand will immediately 10x as soon as AI makes that affordable, as computers have always done. So, profitable (if the AI can cost less than a human for the work), but not changing how the economy works
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  If white collar jobs get automated away to the extent that blue collar jobs were in the industrial revolution, that will be, by definition, a massive upheaval of the economy.

ben_w 2y ago

> 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on . I never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself, and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being re-dubbed as a dystopian nightmare. > AI is aiming for much higher bar of singularity and consciousness. No, it's aiming to be economically useful. "The singularity" is what a lot of people think is an automatic consequence of being able to solve tasks related to AI; me, I think that's how we sustained Moore's Law so long (computers designing computers, you can't place a billion transistors by hand, but even if you could the scale is now well into the zone where quantum tunnelling has to be accounted for in the design), and that "singularities" are a sign something is wrong with the model. "Consciousness" has 40 definitions, and is therefore not even a meaningful target. > Just in every hype cycles we are in peak of inflated expectations, we will reach a plateau of productivity where it is will be useful in specific areas (as it already is) and people will move on to the next fad. In that at least, we agree.

swatcoder 2y ago
> never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself, and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being re-dubbed as a dystopian nightmare. Isn't that funny? It speaks exactly to the GP's point about how frothing and uninformative the "zeitgeist" can be, as my experience happens to have been the opposite of yours. The people I happened to be casually brushing around during those earlier fads happened to be hip to them, or maybe my ears were more attentive, and so I heard them mentioned more often and with more enthusiasm. In contrast, most of what I happen to hear about generative AI, outside of HN, tends to be idly laughing at its foibles and misrepresentation if it's mentioned at all. I don't expect you to have the same experience as me, but I'm careful not to assume too much based on either of ours.

eastbound 2y ago

Common, VR, NFTs and blockchain were always abysses of void looking for a usecase. Driving cars maybe, but development has been stalling for 15 years.

manquer 2y ago
Not to their proponents particularly at the time. For the rest of us in HN it was easier to judge on much mileage will get, but a long time in each cycle we were in the minority, just like the AI skeptics including me and many here are today on how much we will value get. Don’t get are wrong, AI is more real and more useful than the things before it, but everything is on a spectrum of success - some more and some less, but none of it has been or will be world changing or truly global. The true breakthroughs rarely get public or even tech community attention until late in the cycle although their progress is public and can be tracked, like with EUV or mRNA or GLP-1 etc . Others which are incremental changes like 5G or cheaper smartphones do not get as much attention as their impact should warrant especially compared to the fads Hype cycles don’t correlate well with real tech cycles
ben_w 2y ago
I'd say VR is just another form factor for games rather than being a void looking for a use-case, but I agree about NFTs and cryptocurrency*. * technically not all blockchains because git and BitTorrent are both also hash trees and therefore non-currency block-chains, but definitely the cryptocurrency uses of them.
- manquer 2y ago
  The point is not that they are snakeoil and have zero value . Every one of these things have some value in some area of applications. However the hype cycle just as now in AI claimed it will change everything, not hey here is interesting new thing and it is going be used in select applications . Nobody is investing billions and billions on that pitch

tim333 2y ago

>people will move on to the next fad AI isn't really a fad. It's going to something more like electricity, say.

swatcoder 2y ago
My favorite comparison right now is to the microwave oven. It's a novel thing. It's not going anywhere. It makes some things easier, sometimes, in both personal and professional settings. But you're not at a big loss without it and in many cases your choice to do without is a choice that favors quality, control, nuance, and skill refinement.
- tim333 2y ago
  AI probably has more capacity to be incorporated into many things than microwaves.
  - manquer 2y ago
    I will bite, going with your analogy comparing to electricity on the other end of the spectrum. electricity is not ubiquitous in many parts of the global south full 130 years. The common definition is- access to electricity source that can provide very basic lighting, and charge a phone or power a radio for 4 hours per day. Not even grid connected. Even with this basic definition there is still full 660 million people who don’t have access to even that. It only dropped below a billion in 2015. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access You need beyond the basic to be meaningfully transformative, clean cooking fuel access is one proxy used that is still 2Billion people without access for example. Nobody is denying the transformative nature of electricity or say internet , but even these things take a long long time, more than one life time to propagate and be world changing, and not because of their choice of lifestyle to live disconnected. If electricity, clean water, sanitation and nutrition and basic healthcare is not available to half the population, what is AI going to do in next 3- 5 years or whatever ridiculous timeframe Sam Altman keeps talking about . And this is a not productivity problem, there is more than enough food production capacity to feed the world, yet starvation and malnutrition is not solved. AI may rock your world, it is not going to rock the world anytime soon even if was like electricity.

result2vino 2y ago

> 2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything Are you so deep in the SV tech echo chamber that you can’t distinguish between tech bro / snake oil salesman hype and something that actual normal people are engaged by? The only people talking about NFTs in a non-disparaging way were delusional in large part because they themselves bought into it wanted to egg others on. NFTs were just a stupid faddish speculative ‘commodity’ market. It’s a completely different thing. Ditto with “blockchain”. That well was positioned by people trying to make money from cryptocurrencies. The mechanics allowed for that. Again, it’s a completely different thing. Civilians with no vested interest weren’t sitting in restaurants singing the praises of decentralised ledgers or monkey pictures on someone’s Google Drive. I assure you. I also assure you that this IS however happening with ChatGPT. Out here in the real world, we see it. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues with LLMs, both philosophically and in therms of their actual output. This doesn’t mean there aren’t the same old SV snake oil salespeople and YouTube wannabes trying to push some BS products and courses. But let’s not pretend for a second like this is usefully comparable to “blockchain” and “NFTs”.

lupire 2y ago
Blockchain and NFT took over the Super Bowl. That's pretty mainstream. There are Bitcoin ATMs.
manquer 2y ago
I am sorry, every A-List celebrity was shilling a NFT project, from superbowl to other public spheres of discourse seemed all crypto. The future president of the country has a crypto project to sell, I don’t see how much mainstream it can get. Yes, There is close connection to SV hype cycle and what happens in mainstream, most mainstream ones originate in SV but the ones I mentioned specifically impacted the larger public not just SV tech sphere
lodovic 2y ago
I think that underestimates public engagements in these hypes. Billions were wasted by "normal" people worldwide on VR headsets, in-game nfts, and shitcoins. Real world money, not some inflated VC capital projections. And while the current LLMs still are an "advanced Eliza", regular people are quite happy to pay for its services.

sneak 2y ago

Did you really just compare the thing that makes me able to code and ship 5x faster to... NFTs?

manquer 2y ago
Matter of perspective, Ai tools value depends on your existing skill level and whether it only doing what you already can do and you can correct it very well. However that kind of user in my experience is rare , vast majority are junior developers who do not understand the output well enough and now generate 5x of it that I have to review and they no longer make the effort to understand any foundational concept . This is not new, the rise in popularity of StackOverflow created a class of developers who didn’t want to spend the time to learn properly reading the manual. In itself reducing the skill level needed to be productive is not inherently bad, it was PhD in CS could only program in 70s and 80s. Each generation of tech and abstraction opened up software development to newer class of employees. However the difference is the industry desperately needed expansion each time because PCs became popular or the desktop or mobile devices etc . There was enormous demand for new applications both personal and professional which couldn’t be satisfied with kind of volume CS research programs could fulfill. There is no such transformation currently , there aren’t a new class of users or major applications coming up in a such high volume, that quality drop is compensated by quantity . There is lot more need for higher quality products as software market is plateauing from the highs mobile adoption gave.
Terr_ 2y ago
> code and ship I notice that doesn't say what happened to the throughput of "diagnose, fix, and reduce technical debt." :p
johnnyanmac 2y ago
really depends on the kind of AI. If I said I shipped a AI-genned game 5x faster , then people would indeed compare it to NFTs.

DennisP 2y ago

Self-driving won't take over by just being available in the new cars people are buying anyway. It'll take over when people find it cheaper to ride robotaxis than to own a vehicle at all. That's potentially a much quicker transition, requiring significantly fewer new vehicles.

manquer 2y ago
Assuming we get to your level of value prop. It will still only be a choice for new first time buyers If I already own a car, for which am paying an emi and no hope of selling for good value (because market is dropping as newest buyers disappear) it won’t make economic sense for me till I generate LTV from the car to switch over . Either way it till take 1-2 decades after ubiquitous L5 availability, even if that was possible at all and soon
- deleted 2y ago
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bdangubic 2y ago
there are already cheaper ways to ride from point A to point B without owning a car (especially in urban areas) and yet car ownership has never been higher… ideal robotaxis will take at least one full generation to actually materialize. just as a silly personal example, I took a car to the shop and got Uber credits. my wife was heading into the city for an event (had to deal with both traffic and parking) and I was like “take a free Uber” and she was like “no way, driving my own car…” my daughter on the other hand…
mnky9800n 2y ago
Nobody is going to sit and wait for a robo uber in the suburbs for ten minutes to go to the grocery store ten miles down the road. This is the main problem, America has suburbanised itself to hell and no amount of robo taxis will create the world you are suggesting. And elsewhere in the world there’s no need because most places have adequate public transit which solves the problem way more efficiently than robo taxis ever will.

mlyle 2y ago

> despite how far it has come it cannot in next 30 years be ubiquitous, even if the l5 magic tech exists today in every new car sold it will take 15 years for current cars to lifecycle. We must have a different meaning of ubiquitous. Ubiquitous means "found everywhere" not "has eliminated everything else." You don't even need to cycle the fleet once to meet the definition of ubiquitous. If you can get a self driving car in any city and many towns, you see them all over the place, and a third of trips are done with them, that'd be ubiquitous in my book. I don't see why you couldn't get there in 3 decades. I don't think it's likely in 12 years but it seems possible in that timeframe.

manquer 2y ago
I considered fleet change as the transformation that eliminates driving as a needed skill . Getting a slightly better version of Waymo in SF is just augmenting for a poor public transit with a very American car solution . It scales pretty poorly and cannot replace good public transit, at best can augment them as last mile connectivity . There is value to those of course and is disruptive to a sector, it is still a specific use case and not world changing. You are only disrupting the taxi industry not driving itself . The claims at the time was not we are going replace taxis with robotaxis , but driving itself will be a thing of the past. That is the nature of hype cycles .

famouswaffles 2y ago

Comparing the site that was #8 in Internet worldwide traffic last month, has 300M weekly active users, 1B messages a day and is basically the fastest adopted software product in history to NFTs, VR and Blockchain does not make any sense.