5 ms·

The AI Fad Just Burned to the Waterline

48 points by dxs 2y ago

dagelf 2y ago
Another know-it-all calling AI a bubble. Lets revisit this, not in 10 years, but in 5. Things the article misses: "Bubbles" happen for more reasons than hype. There are moats, just not in the obvious or same old places. Funny thing is, an LLM can probably write a better TL;DR, that captures it better, not to mention a more insightful article.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  Agreed. I consider myself an AI skeptic, but this reads like the first-draft ramblings of someone who's never heard of the Gartner Hype Cycle.
  - hooli_gan 2y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
- mbrumlow 2y ago
  Yah. It might write a better TL;DR, but it will always be a tool engineers use. AI is a bubble if you consider the end goal of AI to be a 1:1 replacement for humans. AI is not a bubble if consider the more likely end goal of AI being just another tool. A really good tool but just a tool real indulgence will use. We have seen this many times in the past with tech. While some people did loose jobs over time it evened out and eventually made more jobs. Just look at how many jobs today exist simply because computers exist, a hardware device that was to then replace the modern worker.
  - cheevly 2y ago
    It will be as much a ‘tool’ as human intelligence is a tool.
- skerit 2y ago
  This article seems to completely misread what the DeepSeek release actually represents. The author uses it as evidence of the AI bubble bursting, but DeepSeek demonstrates exactly the opposite: AI becoming more efficient and practical, not less valuable. A small company just released a model that matches leading proprietary systems at 1/30th the running costs and fraction of the training costs ($6M vs $60M+). Yes, this challenges the "moat" of big tech companies, but that's not a bubble bursting - it's a technology becoming more accessible and practical. The author conflates "big tech losing its monopoly" with "AI being a fad."
jebarker 2y ago
I'm really tired of the word "moat".
talles 2y ago
I feel most people are rooting for it to be a fad than actually believing that it is. We've barely started to hook these things up on our business processes and companies are investing heavily right now in doing so. Give it a few years. As for stock prices, no comments from me.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  What business process do you want to hook to?
  - bnchrch 2y ago
    What dont you? 1. Report generation 2. Knowledge search 3. Email / Message drafting and auto response 4. Support 5. Small bug fixes 6. Minor design changes 7. Wireframe first drafts 8. Research assistant 9. Executive assistant 10. Outreach 11. User interviews 12. Personalized ads 13. Voice to code I mean these arent even the theoretical stuff. These (and more) are all happening right now.
    - Gerardo1 2y ago
      1. yes, with reservations 2. yes! but I'd like specific things that a lot of models don't do well quite yet, like accurate, complete citing and contextualizing with quotes across sources, etc. 3. Eh, pretty unexcited but I can see some limited utility. 4. 100% no. 5. Skeptical but there's definitely some good use cases here: smaller bug fixes and linting/vuln/anit-pattern scanning could be good applications, but I'm not sure if its better than the existing non-ai tools. 6. Maybe? If you mean code, existing refactor tools are pretty darn good and are deterministic, they do the thing or they don't. If the tool can't make strong guarantees about that, I'm not interested. 7. Yeah I think that's pretty good. Related: I think there's an application for detecting consistency issues between products/pages/etc that should have a unified design and UX. 8. That's basically #2? 9. I think execs will dump the tool the first time it makes the wrong decision, and I think people the tool reaches out to on behalf of the exec won't take those communications as seriously. 10. No. That's spam, full-stop. 11. No. User's aren't going to take it seriously and aren't going to respond in the same way. Will also be a reputational risk. "Would you mind taking a survey about your experience with our product?" followed by a chat conversation with an AI is going to be dragged online. 12. Absolutely no one wants this. 13. You mean as an accessibility feature? Because I could definitely see that. I'll bring up that the original question was what ways would you want AI integrated into products. Not "what ways are people integrating AI in a desperate chance to hop on the boat" (to borrow the metaphor from the article).
lumenwrites 2y ago
So, a cuttting edge AI model turned out to be much cheaper and easier to produce than we thought. Weird reason to call something a "fad". Here's to hope nobody invents a way to produce much cheaper and faster cars, or this whole Car Fad will be over too.
- meristohm 2y ago
  From M-W dictionary: Fad : a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal : CRAZE Books are also a fad, if "for a time" stretches across lifetimes; advanced technology that requires some infrastructure, dependent on a complex system, but not nearly as much as computers do, nevermind AI, and which is popular amongst a subset of people. Ignore earth-systems collapse and the underlying technology that keeps these fads afloat will cease to function. Computers are a cool diversion but not essential for human "survival and thrival", nor is our widespread embracing of the technology without consequences for life on earth. I would far rather talk with other biased humans than the regurgitations of some biased amalgam-bot made with stolen data, even if it can act syncretically. My bias is as a high-school science teacher who likes helping students gain understanding about the world, and hopefully wisdom, a sense of awe and responsibility, and their own sense of purpose.
- coldtea 2y ago
  The fad pertains to the huge valuations and market hype - which a much cheaper and easier model crashes
  - actuallyalys 2y ago
    “Bubble” is probably more apt.
- voisin 2y ago
  Remember in the mid-90s when people talked about the internet being a fad? I think AI is a fad in the same way, which is to say not a fad at all no matter how much certain entrenched interests wish it were so.
  - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
I'm bullish on AI long term but it still seems over sold currently.
- criddell 2y ago
  So, you think Amara's law applies?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    Yep. Nails it. Nobody wants to be late to the gold rush so we get this hype cycle but it's undercooked at the moment.
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/trends/amaras-law-and-tech-future https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/trends/amara...
MangoCoffee 2y ago
the internet is a fax machine - Paul Krugman Nvidia got lucky - Intel Is AI a fad? Who knows? However, I'm pretty sure we can build on top of this AI wave and use Nvidia's chips or any AI chips for other applications
brianhama 2y ago
I can’t wait to see how this article ages.
- disqard 2y ago
  Not defending or opposing the thesis of the essay, but this person's blog has (roughly) one post every day... it makes one wonder how much thought and editing goes into writing at that pace. Most serious writing I've seen is released at a slower cadence. A large volume of content makes me equate its source with the 24/7 news cycle -- more is better, keep pressing the viewer/reader's buttons (outrage, moral indignation, etc.) to keep 'em coming back.
dboreham 2y ago
There's a difference between "revolutionary new technology" and "guaranteed way to make excessive profits".
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
exabrial 2y ago
Can we please FFS stop adding AI to everything? Crikey.
- smidgeon 2y ago
  More use of the work "crikey" is needed
  - schmookeeg 2y ago
    :) At the rate we're using up names for AI-assistants that we bolt onto every darn thing, I'm sure we'll get down to a "CrikeyAI" offered by some B-tier SaaS company very shortly.
    - saint_yossarian 2y ago
      I guess https://www.krikey.ai/ https://www.krikey.ai/ is close enough :)
readthenotes1 2y ago
What a strange take. It's like saying the indoor lighting fad is over now they're pulling oil out of Pennsylvania. Sure, whaling may be in trouble, but that's just an input to the technology
ebiester 2y ago
I can see this being bad for OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic, for sure, or at least their current valuations, but I just don't understand why people think this is popping the AI bubble. This makes a bad assumption that the state of the art is not progressing, that we have exhausted all ideas about how to make models better, that the only way to make models better is to throw more GPUs to it, that there won't be a significant market for actually running the LLMs, and most importantly, that we have somehow exhausted all of the applications for AI. Even if Deepseek / Deepseek-equivalent models were the limit of what we can do with models, and AI and Anthropic completely busted, we still have ten years at least of developing the most effective applications of them and combining them with other tools to improve productivity. This feels like some people are too high on it, and some people are overreacting.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2025/01/29/running-distilled-deepseek-r1-models-locally-on-copilot-pcs-powered-by-windows-copilot-runtime/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2025/01/29/runnin... Microsoft added DeepSeek to Azure and released a NPU optimized version for offline use
benterix 2y ago
> there is no monopolistic moat to guarantee profits, and no revenue stream to milk. Rather, like deploying billions of dollars on data farms to improve search, there is no revenue at all. Nobody's paying a single dollar for AI enhanced search. Not only is nobody going to pay for "AI-enhanced search", people are actively trying to avoid it. This also applies to several other areas where AI slop is basically damaging any business it touches.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

48 points by dxs 2y ago

Another know-it-all calling AI a bubble. Lets revisit this, not in 10 years, but in 5. Things the article misses: "Bubbles" happen for more reasons than hype. There are moats, just not in the obvious or same old places. Funny thing is, an LLM can probably write a better TL;DR, that captures it better, not to mention a more insightful article.

CharlesW 2y ago
Agreed. I consider myself an AI skeptic, but this reads like the first-draft ramblings of someone who's never heard of the Gartner Hype Cycle.
- hooli_gan 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
mbrumlow 2y ago
Yah. It might write a better TL;DR, but it will always be a tool engineers use. AI is a bubble if you consider the end goal of AI to be a 1:1 replacement for humans. AI is not a bubble if consider the more likely end goal of AI being just another tool. A really good tool but just a tool real indulgence will use. We have seen this many times in the past with tech. While some people did loose jobs over time it evened out and eventually made more jobs. Just look at how many jobs today exist simply because computers exist, a hardware device that was to then replace the modern worker.
- cheevly 2y ago
  It will be as much a ‘tool’ as human intelligence is a tool.
skerit 2y ago
This article seems to completely misread what the DeepSeek release actually represents. The author uses it as evidence of the AI bubble bursting, but DeepSeek demonstrates exactly the opposite: AI becoming more efficient and practical, not less valuable. A small company just released a model that matches leading proprietary systems at 1/30th the running costs and fraction of the training costs ($6M vs $60M+). Yes, this challenges the "moat" of big tech companies, but that's not a bubble bursting - it's a technology becoming more accessible and practical. The author conflates "big tech losing its monopoly" with "AI being a fad."

jebarker 2y ago

I'm really tired of the word "moat".

talles 2y ago

I feel most people are rooting for it to be a fad than actually believing that it is. We've barely started to hook these things up on our business processes and companies are investing heavily right now in doing so. Give it a few years. As for stock prices, no comments from me.

deadbabe 2y ago
What business process do you want to hook to?
- bnchrch 2y ago
  What dont you? 1. Report generation 2. Knowledge search 3. Email / Message drafting and auto response 4. Support 5. Small bug fixes 6. Minor design changes 7. Wireframe first drafts 8. Research assistant 9. Executive assistant 10. Outreach 11. User interviews 12. Personalized ads 13. Voice to code I mean these arent even the theoretical stuff. These (and more) are all happening right now.
  - Gerardo1 2y ago
    1. yes, with reservations 2. yes! but I'd like specific things that a lot of models don't do well quite yet, like accurate, complete citing and contextualizing with quotes across sources, etc. 3. Eh, pretty unexcited but I can see some limited utility. 4. 100% no. 5. Skeptical but there's definitely some good use cases here: smaller bug fixes and linting/vuln/anit-pattern scanning could be good applications, but I'm not sure if its better than the existing non-ai tools. 6. Maybe? If you mean code, existing refactor tools are pretty darn good and are deterministic, they do the thing or they don't. If the tool can't make strong guarantees about that, I'm not interested. 7. Yeah I think that's pretty good. Related: I think there's an application for detecting consistency issues between products/pages/etc that should have a unified design and UX. 8. That's basically #2? 9. I think execs will dump the tool the first time it makes the wrong decision, and I think people the tool reaches out to on behalf of the exec won't take those communications as seriously. 10. No. That's spam, full-stop. 11. No. User's aren't going to take it seriously and aren't going to respond in the same way. Will also be a reputational risk. "Would you mind taking a survey about your experience with our product?" followed by a chat conversation with an AI is going to be dragged online. 12. Absolutely no one wants this. 13. You mean as an accessibility feature? Because I could definitely see that. I'll bring up that the original question was what ways would you want AI integrated into products. Not "what ways are people integrating AI in a desperate chance to hop on the boat" (to borrow the metaphor from the article).

lumenwrites 2y ago

So, a cuttting edge AI model turned out to be much cheaper and easier to produce than we thought. Weird reason to call something a "fad". Here's to hope nobody invents a way to produce much cheaper and faster cars, or this whole Car Fad will be over too.

meristohm 2y ago
From M-W dictionary: Fad : a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal : CRAZE Books are also a fad, if "for a time" stretches across lifetimes; advanced technology that requires some infrastructure, dependent on a complex system, but not nearly as much as computers do, nevermind AI, and which is popular amongst a subset of people. Ignore earth-systems collapse and the underlying technology that keeps these fads afloat will cease to function. Computers are a cool diversion but not essential for human "survival and thrival", nor is our widespread embracing of the technology without consequences for life on earth. I would far rather talk with other biased humans than the regurgitations of some biased amalgam-bot made with stolen data, even if it can act syncretically. My bias is as a high-school science teacher who likes helping students gain understanding about the world, and hopefully wisdom, a sense of awe and responsibility, and their own sense of purpose.
coldtea 2y ago
The fad pertains to the huge valuations and market hype - which a much cheaper and easier model crashes
- actuallyalys 2y ago
  “Bubble” is probably more apt.
voisin 2y ago
Remember in the mid-90s when people talked about the internet being a fad? I think AI is a fad in the same way, which is to say not a fad at all no matter how much certain entrenched interests wish it were so.
- 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

I'm bullish on AI long term but it still seems over sold currently.

criddell 2y ago
So, you think Amara's law applies?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Yep. Nails it. Nobody wants to be late to the gold rush so we get this hype cycle but it's undercooked at the moment.
- cratermoon 2y ago
  “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/trends/amaras-law-and-tech-future https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/trends/amara...

MangoCoffee 2y ago

the internet is a fax machine - Paul Krugman Nvidia got lucky - Intel Is AI a fad? Who knows? However, I'm pretty sure we can build on top of this AI wave and use Nvidia's chips or any AI chips for other applications

brianhama 2y ago

I can’t wait to see how this article ages.

disqard 2y ago
Not defending or opposing the thesis of the essay, but this person's blog has (roughly) one post every day... it makes one wonder how much thought and editing goes into writing at that pace. Most serious writing I've seen is released at a slower cadence. A large volume of content makes me equate its source with the 24/7 news cycle -- more is better, keep pressing the viewer/reader's buttons (outrage, moral indignation, etc.) to keep 'em coming back.

dboreham 2y ago

There's a difference between "revolutionary new technology" and "guaranteed way to make excessive profits".

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

exabrial 2y ago

Can we please FFS stop adding AI to everything? Crikey.

smidgeon 2y ago
More use of the work "crikey" is needed
- schmookeeg 2y ago
  :) At the rate we're using up names for AI-assistants that we bolt onto every darn thing, I'm sure we'll get down to a "CrikeyAI" offered by some B-tier SaaS company very shortly.
  - saint_yossarian 2y ago
    I guess https://www.krikey.ai/ https://www.krikey.ai/ is close enough :)

readthenotes1 2y ago

What a strange take. It's like saying the indoor lighting fad is over now they're pulling oil out of Pennsylvania. Sure, whaling may be in trouble, but that's just an input to the technology

ebiester 2y ago

I can see this being bad for OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic, for sure, or at least their current valuations, but I just don't understand why people think this is popping the AI bubble. This makes a bad assumption that the state of the art is not progressing, that we have exhausted all ideas about how to make models better, that the only way to make models better is to throw more GPUs to it, that there won't be a significant market for actually running the LLMs, and most importantly, that we have somehow exhausted all of the applications for AI. Even if Deepseek / Deepseek-equivalent models were the limit of what we can do with models, and AI and Anthropic completely busted, we still have ten years at least of developing the most effective applications of them and combining them with other tools to improve productivity. This feels like some people are too high on it, and some people are overreacting.

TiredOfLife 2y ago
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2025/01/29/running-distilled-deepseek-r1-models-locally-on-copilot-pcs-powered-by-windows-copilot-runtime/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2025/01/29/runnin... Microsoft added DeepSeek to Azure and released a NPU optimized version for offline use

benterix 2y ago

> there is no monopolistic moat to guarantee profits, and no revenue stream to milk. Rather, like deploying billions of dollars on data farms to improve search, there is no revenue at all. Nobody's paying a single dollar for AI enhanced search. Not only is nobody going to pay for "AI-enhanced search", people are actively trying to avoid it. This also applies to several other areas where AI slop is basically damaging any business it touches.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]