Something I've been saying for two years now is that AI is the most over-hyped and the most under-hyped technology, simultaneously. On the one hand it has been

Something I've been saying for two years now is that AI is the most over-hyped and the most under-hyped technology, simultaneously. On the one hand it has been two years of "x is cooked because this week y came out..." and on the other hand, people who seem to have formed their opinions based on ChatGPT 3.5 and have never checked in again on the state-of-the-art LLMs. In the same time period, social media has done its thing of splitting people into camps on the matter. So, people – broadly speaking, no not you wise HN reader – are either in the "AI is theft and slop" camp or the "AI will bring about infinite prosperity" camp. Reality is way more nuanced, as usual. There are incredible things you can do today with AI that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago. I can quickly make some python script that solves a real-world problem for me, by giving fuzzy instructions to a computer. I can bounce ideas off of an LLM and, even if it's not always 'correct', it's still a valuable rubber-ducky. If you look at the pace of development – compare MidJourney images from a few years ago to the relatively stable generative video clips being created today – it's really hard to say with a straight face that things aren't progressing at a dizzying rate. I can kind of stand in between these two extreme points of view, and paradigm-shift myself into them for a moment. It's not surprising that creative people who have been promised a wonderful world from technology are skeptical – lots of broken promises and regressions from big tech over the past couple of decades. Also unclear why suddenly society would become redistributive when nobody has to work anymore, when the trend has been a concentration of wealth in the hands of the people who own the algorithms. On the other hand, there is a lot of drudgery in modern society. There's a lot of evolution in our brains that's biased to roaming around picking berries and playing music and dancing with our little bands. Sitting in traffic to go sit in a small phone both and review spreadsheets is something a lot of people would happily outsource to an AI. The bottom line – if there is one – is that uncertainty and risk are also huge opportunities. But, it's really hard for anyone to say where all of this is actually headed. I come back to the simultaneity of over-hyped/under-hyped.