7 ms·

I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

182 points by smartmic 2y ago

nativeit 1y ago
There are a lot of IQ points in this comment section being dedicated to debating the semantics of the word “hype” rather than engaging with the substance of what the article discusses.
singularity2001 1y ago
I passively hate haters especially AI haters
deleted 2y ago
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egypturnash 2y ago
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI. I envy being able to write a statement like this without mentioning The Blockchain.
- romanhn 2y ago
  The Cloud has joined The Information Superhighway as boring, foundational technology. Blockchain started out as hype and is still hype. AI/LLMs already provide infinitely more value than blockchain (which, to be fair, remains close to zero).
  - ClumsyPilot 1y ago
    Blockchain provides more utility to people living in sanctioned countries, countries with unstable currencies and to criminals than AI ever could.
asdfman123 2y ago
There's three types of people w.r.t hype: smart people who resist hype, smart people who want to profit off of it, and dumb people who like it. The first type of person already agrees with you. The second type knows but doesn't care. The third isn't going to read this article.
- jackphilson 2y ago
  Fourth type: smart people who like hype because hype is fun and having fun is good.
  - eulgro 2y ago
    That's the third type actually. But for some reason GP decided to qualify each type as either smart or dumb. Here's put better: there's 3 types of people: those who resist hype, those who profit off of it, and those who enjoy it.
    - asdfman123 1y ago
      Could also be the second type in denial about themselves too
    - el_benhameen 2y ago
      I imagine that the people who profit off of it enjoy it too, though? So perhaps we have a “hype enjoyers” superset that includes “profiteers” and “suckers”, but then we need “neutrals” or something to describe those who enjoy it without making or losing money. And then from there …
    - tinco 1y ago
      Exactly, and since it's good to profit, and it's good to have fun, surely it's the smart people who are doing that, and the dumb people who are resisting. I certainly feel dumb for dismissing crypto as only an effective store of value with some minor improvements over the status quo (and some downsides) without considering the implications.
- 2y ago
alehlopeh 2y ago
It just wouldn’t be a solid rant against Big Tech hype cycles like AI and spellcheckers without using the word sheeple.
adamnemecek 2y ago
How delightfully contrarian.
deleted 2y ago
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wewewedxfgdf 2y ago
Sure there's plenty of hype. But its justified to some extent at least. LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history. In computing the big ones are: * creation of computers * personal computers * the Internet and world wide web * LLMs So the hype is at some level entirely warranted - its a revolutionary technology with real impact. As opposed to for example the hype around crypto or NFTs or blockchain or garbage like that.
- alganet 2y ago
  * creation of computers * personal computers * the Internet and world wide web Full stop. There, I fixed the list in a way that will stand the test of time.
  - Zambyte 2y ago
    Just because you don't like LLMs doesn't make them not revolutionary with regards to how people use computers.
    - alganet 2y ago
      I like LLMs, I am rooting for them. They will be revolutionary and join the list once the technology stands the test of time. There you go. A simple test that cannot be rushed by more datacenters.
      - SecretDreams 2y ago
        > A simple test that cannot be rushed by more datacenters. So you're saying we need more datacenters ~ Jensen Huang, probably
        alganet 2y ago
        GPUs might actually make the list before LLMs. One could argue that it is the fourth item on that list, since it is a technology that is standing for a long time by now.
alganet 2y ago
Rather, let's look for things in tech that never hyped but are very useful. If hype is bad, then there must be something good, and unhyped to such high proportions. Something unhypable. Otherwise it's all crap, isn't it? It can't be like that.
- shikon7 2y ago
  Probably these things exist, but if they are truly unhypeable, only a select few will ever know of it, and their economic and societal impact will remain negligible.
  - alganet 1y ago
    I know of a couple used by millions unaware they are actually a thing.
neom 2y ago
find the only 10% is real part interesting. I'm starting to note two distinct camps emerge I think? Transformer architectures are just search (/bad search) vs they are the first commercial grade compression of language into real vectors. The trap I think is it's somewhat subtle in how they discuss things?
erelong 2y ago
find the good, avoid the bad anti-hype hype
bobxmax 2y ago
[flagged]
cafed00d 2y ago
To me, AI hype seems to be the most tangible/real hype in a decade. Ever since mobile & cloud era at their peaks in 2012 or 2014, we’ve had Crypto, AR, VR, and now AI. I have some pocket change bitcoin, ethereum, played around for 2 minutes on my dust-gathering Oculus & Vision Pro; but man, oh man! Am I hooked to ChatGpt or what! It’s truly remarkably useful! You just can’t get this type of thing in one click before. For example, here’s my latest engineering productivity boosting query: “when using a cfg file on the cmd line what does "@" as a prefix do?”
- lgrapenthin 1y ago
  Your example is a better search engine. The AI hype however is the promise that it will be smarter (not just more knowledgeable) than humans and replace all jobs. And it isn't on the way there. Just today, a leading state of the art model, that supposedly passed all the most difficult math entry exams and whatever they "benchmark", reasoned with the assumption of "60 days in January". It would simply assume that and draw conclusions, as if that were normal. It also wasn't able to corrrectly fill out all possible scores in a two player game with four moves and three rules, that I made up. It would get them wrong over and over.
  - kristianp 1y ago
    It's not a better search engine, it's qualitatively different to search. An LLM compose its answers based on what you ask it. Search returns pre-existing texts to you.
    - lgrapenthin 1y ago
      If search was only about finding existing texts, LLMs would be qualitatively worse, as they frequently misquote or even invent non existing sources.
- ratmeadow 1y ago
  It's astonishing how the two camps of LLM believers vs LLM doubters has evolved even though we as people are largely very similar, doing similar work. Why is it that e.g. you believe LLMs are truly revolutionary, whereas e.g. I think they are not? What are the things you are doing with LLMs day to day that are life changing, which I am not doing? I'm so curious. When I think of things that would be revolutionary for my job, I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me - creating an application that is correct, maintainable, efficient, and scalable. That would solve 80% of my job. From my trials of LLMs, they are nowhere near that level, and barely pass the "correct" requirement. Further, the cynic in me wonders what work we can possibly be doing where text generation is revolutionary. Keeping in mind that most of our jobs are ultimately largely pointless anyway, so that implies a limit on the true usefulness of any tool. Why does it matter if I can make a website in 1/10th the time if the website doesn't contribute meaningfully to society?
sqs 2y ago
What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes. > It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that it resembles the fashion industry. Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented". > In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. ... 10% of the AI hype is based on useful facts The author ascribes malice to people who disagree with them about the use of AI. The author says proponents of AI are "greedy", "careless", unskilled, inexperienced, and unproductive. How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential? Don't waste your time on this article. I wish I hadn't. Go build something, or at least make thoughtful, well defined critiques of the world.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad. AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage. I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two years when a rudimentary version of it is finally realized. What especially pisses me off is the know it all tone, like they knew all along it's garbage and that they're above it all. These people are tools with no opinions other then hype = bad and logic = nonexistent.
  - jackphilson 2y ago
    Don't be mad about their opinions, be grateful for the arbitrage opportunity
dlivingston 2y ago
This strikes me as curmudgeonly and unnecessarily contrarian. While it's true that investors, entrepreneurs, corporations, etc. have a vested interest in AI to the tune of trillions of dollars, the impulse to dismiss this as 90% hype (as the author does) is insane. We're only three years into this, and we have: - LLMs with grad student-level competency in everything - Multimodality with complex understanding of photography and technical documents - Image generators that can generate high-quality photos, in any style, with just a text description - Song generators that make pretty decent music and video generators that aren't half bad - Excellent developer tooling & autocomplete; very competent code generation This is still early and the foundations are still being laid. Imagine where we'll be in 10 years, assuming even a linear growth rate in capabilities. Think of what the internet is today, and its permanence in everything, and where it was just 30 years ago. By all means, resist the hype - but don't go so far in the other direction that your head is in the sand.
- rileymat2 2y ago
  Why would we assume linear growth in capabilities and not a logarithmic growth rate? It seems time and time again, it gets harder and harder to make progress. I think back to using Dragon Natural Dictation in 1998, there seemed to be exponential promise and a ton of excitement in my young mind. But the reality was more logarithmic improvements so it is finally pretty good 25 years later.
  - shikon7 2y ago
    Combine an exponential growth in investments (that is inherent to our economy) with a logarithmic return in capabilities, and you get a linear increase in capabilities.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
      So if you want a baby in one month, invest in 9 mothers?
- lgrapenthin 1y ago
deleted 2y ago
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dsr_ 2y ago
hype is short for hyperbole, and if there is any hyperbole more excessive than claiming that LLMs are vaguely equivalent to people by calling them "AI", it would have to be a claim of godhood or similar.
wewewedxfgdf 2y ago
A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul-krugmans-poor-prediction https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul...
- Maxamillion96 2y ago
  He’s 100 percent correct and if you disagree you underestimate the effects of the Fax Machine on the economy and over-estimate the effects of the internet of 2005. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krugman-got-something-very-right-about-the-internet-the-fax-machine-and-the-economy?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug...
- latexr 2y ago
  The amount of misuse this quote gets is as absurd as it is tiresome. People were using it to defend NFTs too. Someone’s opinion on one thing says nothing about someone else’s opinion about a different thing.
  - mjr00 2y ago
    Yeah, the Krugman quote gets pulled out around literally everything. Bitcoin/Blockchain/NFTs, Metaverse, AR/VR, I'm sure some other things I was forgetting. For every Krugman "the internet will be as useful as the fax machine" quote, there's a corresponding quote like Gartner in 2022 - "Gartner Predicts 25% of People Will Spend At Least One Hour Per Day in the Metaverse by 2026."[0] [0] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-02-07-gartner-predicts-25-percent-of-people-will-spend-at-least-one-hour-per-day-in-the-metaverse-by-2026 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-02-0...
  - noosphr 1y ago
kylecazar 2y ago
I typically disagree with the practice of hating things just because they are trending, this is the stuff hipsters are made of. But, there is a such thing as negative hype. A seller of AI models telling the world he's not hiring engineers anymore (and they too can cut their workforce) because his models are that good would be negative hype.
sethops1 2y ago
I've learned to treat AI hype the same way I think about sports. Just ignore it. Sure I can name the popular models of the day in the same way I can name the Dallas Cowboys, but none of it matters and none of it affects me.
mberning 1y ago
I worked for a very large industrial some years ago. Our leaders were so ate up with the VR hype that they greenlit a VR training experience for field technicians wherein the technician would wear a VR headset and then use a virtual iPad to diagnose some of our heavy equipment. Someone asked why they couldn’t just use an iPad IRL to learn. There was no rational justification. Shortly after that web 3.0 took off and I started to hear that we were going to use blockchain to track the maintenance of our heavy equipment. Now they won’t shut up about AI.
kevinherron 1y ago
They should have let an AI check their spelling and grammar, maybe they wouldn’t have used “loose” instead of “lose” multiple times.
- ZeroTalent 1y ago
  Grammarly is among the best applications of LLMs I have seen. I'm glad to be paying for it. It even detects and modifies "typical AI phrases," which is ironic.
xlinux 1y ago
I believed crypto was a scam and missed life time fortune and not goona believe what others say about AI. I'm all in on AI
hank808 1y ago
Post is from August of last year. 2024-08-21
budududuroiu 1y ago
The reason for this AI hype is how bullshit Western economies have become. I write an AI email which you summarise and we can both be happy that we contributed to the GDP through spending tokens. In the meantime, nothing tangible has been produced. We’re just hyping ourselves over selling snake oil faster.
resters 1y ago
Bookmark this for a good laugh in a few few years.
angarg12 1y ago
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI. Cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there. I fail to see how that's hype.
- re-thc 1y ago
  > I fail to see how that's hype. Server management, data center and related business existed ages ago. What's hype is this cloud? People are made to believe that cloud is not a server or servers. It's an enhancement sure, but not something completely new or different. > it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there And most of them would be fine without it. Rent some racks. Run some servers. That's exactly why it's hype.
  - babyent 1y ago
    It is a service layer that enabled organizational efficiency.
- bmink 1y ago
  The hype is that “cloud” is and makes everything magically better / easier / more secure / more efficient etc. Many companies jumped head first into large-scale cloud migrations and buildouts without any thought about where and how “cloud” makes sense, what the risks / downsides / true costs are, etc. Just like they are doing now with AI.
mac-attack 1y ago
As a Linux user, I do think there's a bit of an echo chamber which leads to groupthink such as this article. And it's ironic because a lot of the underpinnings of AI use Linux as their underpinning.
sandspar 1y ago
You can measure hype by how many people are talking about an idea space. Write an article about "X hype is bad" and yup, you're talking about the idea space i.e. you're participating in the hype.
Animats 1y ago
It's not as bad as battery hype. Remember all those articles about some minor advance in surface chemistry which was then hyped into Trillion Dollar Industry Real Soon Now? They usually appeared in one of Nature's off-brand journals, or just arxiv, not in Chemical Engineering News or IEEE Trans. on Power Engineering. Such articles usually lacked the usual performance numbers (Wh/L, Wh/Kg, and Wh/$). Then there's Javascript framework hype, which makes everyone run very hard to stay in the same place. AI is at least making rapid progress. It's been less than three years since ChatGPT came out. Having lived and worked through the "AI Winter" (1984-2005), this is an improvement. The main problem now remains "hallucinations", or worse, "agentic" systems which act on hallucinations.
stego-tech 1y ago
The amount of AI boosters and defenders wading in here to bash anyone with a less-than-glowing perspective of the technology is...disappointing. If the technology is truly as revolutionary as you proclaim it to be, then why are you here defending it instead of changing the world with it, as you claim it can? Stop trying to convince detractors with empty arguments, and show us the actual results you claim to have. > Hype is always bad. As someone who actually has to implement stuff and support it thereafter, rather than just bolt it onto my resume and ride the hypetrain to equityville, I wholeheartedly agree with OP's core message here. After web2.0 devolved into walled gardens, closed APIs, and gargantuan surveillance apparatuses designed to serve advertisements in a more precise way than actual cruise missiles, I became soured on the very field I am also fiercely passionate about (IT). The modern technology field is exclusively hype-oriented. There's something new every year you simply must adopt and become an expert in, or you'll lose your job. The ROI is irrelevant (namely because it rarely exists for most organizations in the early adopter phase, if ever), the functionality is irrelevant, the use case is especially irrelevant. It's "new", it's shiny, and you simply must have it to be a "modern" business. Hype is meant to be a direct replacement for objectivity. It warps math and statistics to justify its necessity (like those cloud migration calculators every vendor likes to point to, in order to justify a wholesale migration off your present estate), the salesfolk strong-arm your leadership into adoption regardless of the advice of their internal architects and engineers, and C-Suites can recite dozens of brands in the Gartner "Leader" quadrant for any given technology while simultaneously having no clue what that technology actually does or is used for. It's all hype. And an economy built on the hype-cycle has very real, immediate consequences for the average person. It raises energy rates (https://www.usatoday.com/story/business/energy-resource/2025/04/14/will-ai-raise-my-power-bill-what-to-know/83083361007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/business/energy-resource/2025...) and takes water from communities not provisioned for such large scale industrial use (https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/11alive-news-investigates/data-center-boom-georgia-water-resources/85-01dc6838-72e2-4043-8724-783cabc93664 https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/11alive-...), both of which harm locals while the companies skirt by without paying for their fair share of consumption (https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/extracting-profits-from-the-public-how-utility-ratepayers-are-paying-for-big-techs-power/ https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/extracting-profits-from-the-pub...). That doesn't even get into the grifts involved with IP, copyright, or elimination of well-paying jobs (https://green.spacedino.net/the-final-grift/ https://green.spacedino.net/the-final-grift/), or the boom-bust cycles that often saddle consumers and taxpayers with the steep losses (both monetary and jobs) incurred once the early investors have sailed off into the sunset with their cartoonishly-large sacks of money and a new superyacht to show for their efforts. The most immediate and pressing concern for the AI hype is the squandering of finite resources (fresh water, land, and energy chief among them) to train and operate these models on a highly speculative assumption that this revolution in AI will finally be the one that brings humanity into the future, cures all disease, and enables us all to live a life of leisure (rather than just the offensively rich) while waiting for immortality to arrive so we can explore the cosmos. To make this po-faced argument in the face of the present climate disaster demonstrates a complete lack of basic situational awareness, undermining any sort of credibility they may have with anyone who can consider the interactions of two separate systems; we can literally only pursue AI or ameliorate climate change right now with our current capacities in energy, water, and rare earths, and of those two only the latter is actually, demonstrably solved and merely requires global implementation. It demonstrates a selfish mindset of self-preservation (your career in AI) over the protection and support of the whole, and it's all just hype. I'm not opposed to new technologies. Containers are a game changer, Kubernetes is improving its usability (in baby steps), composable infrastructure through code is a godsend, and the consumption-based models of public cloud providers have made hosting your own place on the internet cheaper than ever before. We've had some great innovations in these past ten years, almost all of which have been completely overshadowed by the perpetual hype train around get-rich investment schemes (crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI). The hype is the problem, which is what the author was getting at.
DavidPiper 1y ago
I tend to agree with the author, but I think the real problem with hype is the opportunity cost. Somewhere along the way we bought into this idea that "the promise of X" is worth more than "the reality of X". The longer the hype goes on - which is to say the longer it takes to demonstrate the hype is actually reality - the more people become more heavily invested in it. If the hype never materialises, you basically build a larger and larger black swan when the crash arrives. The people who win are the few who got out early enough, and everyone else who ignored the hype. If the hype does eventuate, the number of people you're now competing with in a new market is proportional to the length of time it took to eventuate, because for all those people that were onboard, some of them would enter the space in competition, not just as consumers. Again, the only outsized winners are those who got out early enough. The rest are now just working BAU. Like everyone else who ignored the hype. In both cases, you're just as good or better off ignoring the hype because the chances of you winning big are tiny (unless you're a billionaire, but in that case you were already winning anyway).
- alganet 1y ago
  If the hype materializes, it can still change course. Learned some classical ASP to join the web dev hype? Well, tough luck. The hype was good but materialized in another vessel. If you learned enough fundamentals, you could still jump ship. But what are the fundamentals for LLM? Hype rarely reveals them right away. For LLMs, tough luck. You can't learn fundamentals with your toy PC yet. You need to be rich and have server grade hardware. Also, you cannot buy server grade hardware because it is out of stock. But that's ok, few people will learn it and I will look from the sidelines until an acessible opportunity reveals itself. If it doesn't get acessible, well, it probably will be some niche tech like COBOL. Pays awesomelly, but not my jam. That is winning for some people. So many possible scenarios. You or someone else will try to expand and deflect on a single one, won't you? I know you will. No crystal ball, just intuition. So, I will fucking learn what I can learn, what I like to learn, and I will hope I can survive on what it pays. That is winning in my books (at least on such narrow economic definition of it). I like LLMs, but the good part is in training. Just using it is kind of... being an user. I can do that without faking as if it were truly learning it. You are presenting an economic angle. I won't ignore it, but there is more to it for me. Premise, reality, etc. So maleable.
potsandpans 1y ago
People who are so reactive and sensitive to "hype" and "clickbait" have something of a mental illness.
babyent 1y ago
Kind of a bad article (IMO) when it sideswipes cloud computing. The "cloud" was actually useful, and helped to scale so many companies that could bring their products to millions of people quickly and without too many issues, and with good reliability. Blockchain, hyper enabled gambling, cryptocurrency, and jamming "AI" into everything are bad though.
myko 1y ago
I'll be hyped for an AI that can do my dishes / fold and put away laundry / clean my tub
sreekanth850 1y ago
>Nobody wants to talk to an AI when they need support. We all HATE that! It is bad enough that when you need service and support you end up talking to someone on the other side of the planet who's using some kind of answer sheet with absolutely no clue on how to really help you. This is true from my personal experience. Had switched my fiber provider because, with my previous provider, i was never able to talk to a human.
serverlessmania 1y ago
"Less competent employees are often the ones promoting AI." I don't understand how this post is HN front page…
serverlessmania 1y ago
“Hype is harmful and deceptive.” Congratulations on identifying marketing exists. What’s next? You gonna blow the whistle on toothpaste commercials? Of course hype is driven by profit. That’s literally the point of business. But you know what else was hyped once? The internet. And electricity. And antibiotics. Being annoyed that people are excited about tech is not a worldview—it's a vibe. A really boring one.
serverlessmania 1y ago
“Modern tech hype mirrors medieval charlatans.” Ah, yes, the classic “this thing I don’t like is medieval alchemy” comparison. Because if you can’t refute the tools, just compare it to snake oil. It’s cute how this guy thinks he’s the only one who’s noticed not every AI startup is curing cancer. The tech world has always had grifters. That doesn’t mean the tools themselves are fake—it means some people are dumb and others are greedy, which is kind of how humanity works.
- felipeerias 1y ago
  Medieval alchemy gave us modern chemistry, just like ancient and medieval astrology gave us modern astronomy. The Enlightenment age brought about an increased interest in occultism right next to an increased interest in science, often by the same people. When a new knowledge area is starting out, it can be pretty hard to discriminate between the real and the imaginary.
serverlessmania 1y ago
“AI is misleading, there’s no actual intelligence.” Oh wow, you figured out “Artificial Intelligence” isn’t literal. You should tell the rest of the planet. Maybe we should rename it “Statistical Pattern Prediction Machines That Are Better at Your Job Than You Are.” It’s a mouthful, but more honest.
zhivota 1y ago
It's kind of funny to me how impossible it is to distinguish hype that's around an underlying technology that is going to really change things, and hype that is around an underlying technology that is not going to do anything. I think many people today are super jaded because they lived through IoT, crypto (a hype train that had tons of idiotic permutations), metaverse, voice as the future of all computing, and maybe more I'm forgetting. But don't let those experiences jade you to the fact that we have lived through multiple actual huge disruptions: Internet, mobile phones, social media, battery tech, solar and wind becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, and more. The fact is you just can't tell which is which, but I can say this - I never found any use in IoT or crypto or metaverse crap. But I find a lot of use out of LLMs. At the very least they are going to be a useful tool for a lot of things in the future. Whether they go further is independent of hype.

182 points by smartmic 2y ago

There are a lot of IQ points in this comment section being dedicated to debating the semantics of the word “hype” rather than engaging with the substance of what the article discusses.

singularity2001 1y ago

I passively hate haters especially AI haters

deleted 2y ago

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egypturnash 2y ago

> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI. I envy being able to write a statement like this without mentioning The Blockchain.

romanhn 2y ago
The Cloud has joined The Information Superhighway as boring, foundational technology. Blockchain started out as hype and is still hype. AI/LLMs already provide infinitely more value than blockchain (which, to be fair, remains close to zero).
- ClumsyPilot 1y ago
  Blockchain provides more utility to people living in sanctioned countries, countries with unstable currencies and to criminals than AI ever could.

asdfman123 2y ago

There's three types of people w.r.t hype: smart people who resist hype, smart people who want to profit off of it, and dumb people who like it. The first type of person already agrees with you. The second type knows but doesn't care. The third isn't going to read this article.

jackphilson 2y ago
Fourth type: smart people who like hype because hype is fun and having fun is good.
- eulgro 2y ago
  That's the third type actually. But for some reason GP decided to qualify each type as either smart or dumb. Here's put better: there's 3 types of people: those who resist hype, those who profit off of it, and those who enjoy it.
  - asdfman123 1y ago
    Could also be the second type in denial about themselves too
  - el_benhameen 2y ago
    I imagine that the people who profit off of it enjoy it too, though? So perhaps we have a “hype enjoyers” superset that includes “profiteers” and “suckers”, but then we need “neutrals” or something to describe those who enjoy it without making or losing money. And then from there …
  - tinco 1y ago
    Exactly, and since it's good to profit, and it's good to have fun, surely it's the smart people who are doing that, and the dumb people who are resisting. I certainly feel dumb for dismissing crypto as only an effective store of value with some minor improvements over the status quo (and some downsides) without considering the implications.
2y ago

alehlopeh 2y ago

It just wouldn’t be a solid rant against Big Tech hype cycles like AI and spellcheckers without using the word sheeple.

adamnemecek 2y ago

How delightfully contrarian.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

wewewedxfgdf 2y ago

Sure there's plenty of hype. But its justified to some extent at least. LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history. In computing the big ones are: * creation of computers * personal computers * the Internet and world wide web * LLMs So the hype is at some level entirely warranted - its a revolutionary technology with real impact. As opposed to for example the hype around crypto or NFTs or blockchain or garbage like that.

alganet 2y ago
* creation of computers * personal computers * the Internet and world wide web Full stop. There, I fixed the list in a way that will stand the test of time.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  Just because you don't like LLMs doesn't make them not revolutionary with regards to how people use computers.
  - alganet 2y ago
    I like LLMs, I am rooting for them. They will be revolutionary and join the list once the technology stands the test of time. There you go. A simple test that cannot be rushed by more datacenters.
    - SecretDreams 2y ago
      > A simple test that cannot be rushed by more datacenters. So you're saying we need more datacenters ~ Jensen Huang, probably
      - alganet 2y ago
        GPUs might actually make the list before LLMs. One could argue that it is the fourth item on that list, since it is a technology that is standing for a long time by now.

alganet 2y ago

Rather, let's look for things in tech that never hyped but are very useful. If hype is bad, then there must be something good, and unhyped to such high proportions. Something unhypable. Otherwise it's all crap, isn't it? It can't be like that.

shikon7 2y ago
Probably these things exist, but if they are truly unhypeable, only a select few will ever know of it, and their economic and societal impact will remain negligible.
- alganet 1y ago
  I know of a couple used by millions unaware they are actually a thing.

neom 2y ago

find the only 10% is real part interesting. I'm starting to note two distinct camps emerge I think? Transformer architectures are just search (/bad search) vs they are the first commercial grade compression of language into real vectors. The trap I think is it's somewhat subtle in how they discuss things?

erelong 2y ago

find the good, avoid the bad anti-hype hype

bobxmax 2y ago

[flagged]

cafed00d 2y ago

To me, AI hype seems to be the most tangible/real hype in a decade. Ever since mobile & cloud era at their peaks in 2012 or 2014, we’ve had Crypto, AR, VR, and now AI. I have some pocket change bitcoin, ethereum, played around for 2 minutes on my dust-gathering Oculus & Vision Pro; but man, oh man! Am I hooked to ChatGpt or what! It’s truly remarkably useful! You just can’t get this type of thing in one click before. For example, here’s my latest engineering productivity boosting query: “when using a cfg file on the cmd line what does "@" as a prefix do?”

lgrapenthin 1y ago
Your example is a better search engine. The AI hype however is the promise that it will be smarter (not just more knowledgeable) than humans and replace all jobs. And it isn't on the way there. Just today, a leading state of the art model, that supposedly passed all the most difficult math entry exams and whatever they "benchmark", reasoned with the assumption of "60 days in January". It would simply assume that and draw conclusions, as if that were normal. It also wasn't able to corrrectly fill out all possible scores in a two player game with four moves and three rules, that I made up. It would get them wrong over and over.
- kristianp 1y ago
  It's not a better search engine, it's qualitatively different to search. An LLM compose its answers based on what you ask it. Search returns pre-existing texts to you.
  - lgrapenthin 1y ago
    If search was only about finding existing texts, LLMs would be qualitatively worse, as they frequently misquote or even invent non existing sources.
ratmeadow 1y ago
It's astonishing how the two camps of LLM believers vs LLM doubters has evolved even though we as people are largely very similar, doing similar work. Why is it that e.g. you believe LLMs are truly revolutionary, whereas e.g. I think they are not? What are the things you are doing with LLMs day to day that are life changing, which I am not doing? I'm so curious. When I think of things that would be revolutionary for my job, I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me - creating an application that is correct, maintainable, efficient, and scalable. That would solve 80% of my job. From my trials of LLMs, they are nowhere near that level, and barely pass the "correct" requirement. Further, the cynic in me wonders what work we can possibly be doing where text generation is revolutionary. Keeping in mind that most of our jobs are ultimately largely pointless anyway, so that implies a limit on the true usefulness of any tool. Why does it matter if I can make a website in 1/10th the time if the website doesn't contribute meaningfully to society?

sqs 2y ago

What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes. > It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that it resembles the fashion industry. Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented". > In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. ... 10% of the AI hype is based on useful facts The author ascribes malice to people who disagree with them about the use of AI. The author says proponents of AI are "greedy", "careless", unskilled, inexperienced, and unproductive. How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential? Don't waste your time on this article. I wish I hadn't. Go build something, or at least make thoughtful, well defined critiques of the world.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad. AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage. I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two years when a rudimentary version of it is finally realized. What especially pisses me off is the know it all tone, like they knew all along it's garbage and that they're above it all. These people are tools with no opinions other then hype = bad and logic = nonexistent.
- jackphilson 2y ago
  Don't be mad about their opinions, be grateful for the arbitrage opportunity

dlivingston 2y ago

This strikes me as curmudgeonly and unnecessarily contrarian. While it's true that investors, entrepreneurs, corporations, etc. have a vested interest in AI to the tune of trillions of dollars, the impulse to dismiss this as 90% hype (as the author does) is insane. We're only three years into this, and we have: - LLMs with grad student-level competency in everything - Multimodality with complex understanding of photography and technical documents - Image generators that can generate high-quality photos, in any style, with just a text description - Song generators that make pretty decent music and video generators that aren't half bad - Excellent developer tooling & autocomplete; very competent code generation This is still early and the foundations are still being laid. Imagine where we'll be in 10 years, assuming even a linear growth rate in capabilities. Think of what the internet is today, and its permanence in everything, and where it was just 30 years ago. By all means, resist the hype - but don't go so far in the other direction that your head is in the sand.

rileymat2 2y ago
Why would we assume linear growth in capabilities and not a logarithmic growth rate? It seems time and time again, it gets harder and harder to make progress. I think back to using Dragon Natural Dictation in 1998, there seemed to be exponential promise and a ton of excitement in my young mind. But the reality was more logarithmic improvements so it is finally pretty good 25 years later.
- shikon7 2y ago
  Combine an exponential growth in investments (that is inherent to our economy) with a logarithmic return in capabilities, and you get a linear increase in capabilities.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
    So if you want a baby in one month, invest in 9 mothers?
lgrapenthin 1y ago

deleted 2y ago

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dsr_ 2y ago

hype is short for hyperbole, and if there is any hyperbole more excessive than claiming that LLMs are vaguely equivalent to people by calling them "AI", it would have to be a claim of godhood or similar.

wewewedxfgdf 2y ago

A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul-krugmans-poor-prediction https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul...

Maxamillion96 2y ago
He’s 100 percent correct and if you disagree you underestimate the effects of the Fax Machine on the economy and over-estimate the effects of the internet of 2005. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krugman-got-something-very-right-about-the-internet-the-fax-machine-and-the-economy?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug...
latexr 2y ago
The amount of misuse this quote gets is as absurd as it is tiresome. People were using it to defend NFTs too. Someone’s opinion on one thing says nothing about someone else’s opinion about a different thing.
- mjr00 2y ago
  Yeah, the Krugman quote gets pulled out around literally everything. Bitcoin/Blockchain/NFTs, Metaverse, AR/VR, I'm sure some other things I was forgetting. For every Krugman "the internet will be as useful as the fax machine" quote, there's a corresponding quote like Gartner in 2022 - "Gartner Predicts 25% of People Will Spend At Least One Hour Per Day in the Metaverse by 2026."[0] [0] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-02-07-gartner-predicts-25-percent-of-people-will-spend-at-least-one-hour-per-day-in-the-metaverse-by-2026 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-02-0...
- noosphr 1y ago

kylecazar 2y ago

I typically disagree with the practice of hating things just because they are trending, this is the stuff hipsters are made of. But, there is a such thing as negative hype. A seller of AI models telling the world he's not hiring engineers anymore (and they too can cut their workforce) because his models are that good would be negative hype.

sethops1 2y ago

I've learned to treat AI hype the same way I think about sports. Just ignore it. Sure I can name the popular models of the day in the same way I can name the Dallas Cowboys, but none of it matters and none of it affects me.

mberning 1y ago

I worked for a very large industrial some years ago. Our leaders were so ate up with the VR hype that they greenlit a VR training experience for field technicians wherein the technician would wear a VR headset and then use a virtual iPad to diagnose some of our heavy equipment. Someone asked why they couldn’t just use an iPad IRL to learn. There was no rational justification. Shortly after that web 3.0 took off and I started to hear that we were going to use blockchain to track the maintenance of our heavy equipment. Now they won’t shut up about AI.

kevinherron 1y ago

They should have let an AI check their spelling and grammar, maybe they wouldn’t have used “loose” instead of “lose” multiple times.

ZeroTalent 1y ago
Grammarly is among the best applications of LLMs I have seen. I'm glad to be paying for it. It even detects and modifies "typical AI phrases," which is ironic.

xlinux 1y ago

I believed crypto was a scam and missed life time fortune and not goona believe what others say about AI. I'm all in on AI

hank808 1y ago

Post is from August of last year. 2024-08-21

budududuroiu 1y ago

The reason for this AI hype is how bullshit Western economies have become. I write an AI email which you summarise and we can both be happy that we contributed to the GDP through spending tokens. In the meantime, nothing tangible has been produced. We’re just hyping ourselves over selling snake oil faster.

resters 1y ago

Bookmark this for a good laugh in a few few years.

angarg12 1y ago

> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI. Cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there. I fail to see how that's hype.

re-thc 1y ago
> I fail to see how that's hype. Server management, data center and related business existed ages ago. What's hype is this cloud? People are made to believe that cloud is not a server or servers. It's an enhancement sure, but not something completely new or different. > it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there And most of them would be fine without it. Rent some racks. Run some servers. That's exactly why it's hype.
- babyent 1y ago
  It is a service layer that enabled organizational efficiency.
bmink 1y ago
The hype is that “cloud” is and makes everything magically better / easier / more secure / more efficient etc. Many companies jumped head first into large-scale cloud migrations and buildouts without any thought about where and how “cloud” makes sense, what the risks / downsides / true costs are, etc. Just like they are doing now with AI.

mac-attack 1y ago

As a Linux user, I do think there's a bit of an echo chamber which leads to groupthink such as this article. And it's ironic because a lot of the underpinnings of AI use Linux as their underpinning.

sandspar 1y ago

You can measure hype by how many people are talking about an idea space. Write an article about "X hype is bad" and yup, you're talking about the idea space i.e. you're participating in the hype.

Animats 1y ago

It's not as bad as battery hype. Remember all those articles about some minor advance in surface chemistry which was then hyped into Trillion Dollar Industry Real Soon Now? They usually appeared in one of Nature's off-brand journals, or just arxiv, not in Chemical Engineering News or IEEE Trans. on Power Engineering. Such articles usually lacked the usual performance numbers (Wh/L, Wh/Kg, and Wh/$). Then there's Javascript framework hype, which makes everyone run very hard to stay in the same place. AI is at least making rapid progress. It's been less than three years since ChatGPT came out. Having lived and worked through the "AI Winter" (1984-2005), this is an improvement. The main problem now remains "hallucinations", or worse, "agentic" systems which act on hallucinations.

stego-tech 1y ago

The amount of AI boosters and defenders wading in here to bash anyone with a less-than-glowing perspective of the technology is...disappointing. If the technology is truly as revolutionary as you proclaim it to be, then why are you here defending it instead of changing the world with it, as you claim it can? Stop trying to convince detractors with empty arguments, and show us the actual results you claim to have. > Hype is always bad. As someone who actually has to implement stuff and support it thereafter, rather than just bolt it onto my resume and ride the hypetrain to equityville, I wholeheartedly agree with OP's core message here. After web2.0 devolved into walled gardens, closed APIs, and gargantuan surveillance apparatuses designed to serve advertisements in a more precise way than actual cruise missiles, I became soured on the very field I am also fiercely passionate about (IT). The modern technology field is exclusively hype-oriented. There's something new every year you simply must adopt and become an expert in, or you'll lose your job. The ROI is irrelevant (namely because it rarely exists for most organizations in the early adopter phase, if ever), the functionality is irrelevant, the use case is especially irrelevant. It's "new", it's shiny, and you simply must have it to be a "modern" business. Hype is meant to be a direct replacement for objectivity. It warps math and statistics to justify its necessity (like those cloud migration calculators every vendor likes to point to, in order to justify a wholesale migration off your present estate), the salesfolk strong-arm your leadership into adoption regardless of the advice of their internal architects and engineers, and C-Suites can recite dozens of brands in the Gartner "Leader" quadrant for any given technology while simultaneously having no clue what that technology actually does or is used for. It's all hype. And an economy built on the hype-cycle has very real, immediate consequences for the average person. It raises energy rates (https://www.usatoday.com/story/business/energy-resource/2025/04/14/will-ai-raise-my-power-bill-what-to-know/83083361007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/business/energy-resource/2025...) and takes water from communities not provisioned for such large scale industrial use (https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/11alive-news-investigates/data-center-boom-georgia-water-resources/85-01dc6838-72e2-4043-8724-783cabc93664 https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/11alive-...), both of which harm locals while the companies skirt by without paying for their fair share of consumption (https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/extracting-profits-from-the-public-how-utility-ratepayers-are-paying-for-big-techs-power/ https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/extracting-profits-from-the-pub...). That doesn't even get into the grifts involved with IP, copyright, or elimination of well-paying jobs (https://green.spacedino.net/the-final-grift/ https://green.spacedino.net/the-final-grift/), or the boom-bust cycles that often saddle consumers and taxpayers with the steep losses (both monetary and jobs) incurred once the early investors have sailed off into the sunset with their cartoonishly-large sacks of money and a new superyacht to show for their efforts. The most immediate and pressing concern for the AI hype is the squandering of finite resources (fresh water, land, and energy chief among them) to train and operate these models on a highly speculative assumption that this revolution in AI will finally be the one that brings humanity into the future, cures all disease, and enables us all to live a life of leisure (rather than just the offensively rich) while waiting for immortality to arrive so we can explore the cosmos. To make this po-faced argument in the face of the present climate disaster demonstrates a complete lack of basic situational awareness, undermining any sort of credibility they may have with anyone who can consider the interactions of two separate systems; we can literally only pursue AI or ameliorate climate change right now with our current capacities in energy, water, and rare earths, and of those two only the latter is actually, demonstrably solved and merely requires global implementation. It demonstrates a selfish mindset of self-preservation (your career in AI) over the protection and support of the whole, and it's all just hype. I'm not opposed to new technologies. Containers are a game changer, Kubernetes is improving its usability (in baby steps), composable infrastructure through code is a godsend, and the consumption-based models of public cloud providers have made hosting your own place on the internet cheaper than ever before. We've had some great innovations in these past ten years, almost all of which have been completely overshadowed by the perpetual hype train around get-rich investment schemes (crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI). The hype is the problem, which is what the author was getting at.

DavidPiper 1y ago

I tend to agree with the author, but I think the real problem with hype is the opportunity cost. Somewhere along the way we bought into this idea that "the promise of X" is worth more than "the reality of X". The longer the hype goes on - which is to say the longer it takes to demonstrate the hype is actually reality - the more people become more heavily invested in it. If the hype never materialises, you basically build a larger and larger black swan when the crash arrives. The people who win are the few who got out early enough, and everyone else who ignored the hype. If the hype does eventuate, the number of people you're now competing with in a new market is proportional to the length of time it took to eventuate, because for all those people that were onboard, some of them would enter the space in competition, not just as consumers. Again, the only outsized winners are those who got out early enough. The rest are now just working BAU. Like everyone else who ignored the hype. In both cases, you're just as good or better off ignoring the hype because the chances of you winning big are tiny (unless you're a billionaire, but in that case you were already winning anyway).

alganet 1y ago
If the hype materializes, it can still change course. Learned some classical ASP to join the web dev hype? Well, tough luck. The hype was good but materialized in another vessel. If you learned enough fundamentals, you could still jump ship. But what are the fundamentals for LLM? Hype rarely reveals them right away. For LLMs, tough luck. You can't learn fundamentals with your toy PC yet. You need to be rich and have server grade hardware. Also, you cannot buy server grade hardware because it is out of stock. But that's ok, few people will learn it and I will look from the sidelines until an acessible opportunity reveals itself. If it doesn't get acessible, well, it probably will be some niche tech like COBOL. Pays awesomelly, but not my jam. That is winning for some people. So many possible scenarios. You or someone else will try to expand and deflect on a single one, won't you? I know you will. No crystal ball, just intuition. So, I will fucking learn what I can learn, what I like to learn, and I will hope I can survive on what it pays. That is winning in my books (at least on such narrow economic definition of it). I like LLMs, but the good part is in training. Just using it is kind of... being an user. I can do that without faking as if it were truly learning it. You are presenting an economic angle. I won't ignore it, but there is more to it for me. Premise, reality, etc. So maleable.

potsandpans 1y ago

People who are so reactive and sensitive to "hype" and "clickbait" have something of a mental illness.

babyent 1y ago

Kind of a bad article (IMO) when it sideswipes cloud computing. The "cloud" was actually useful, and helped to scale so many companies that could bring their products to millions of people quickly and without too many issues, and with good reliability. Blockchain, hyper enabled gambling, cryptocurrency, and jamming "AI" into everything are bad though.

myko 1y ago

I'll be hyped for an AI that can do my dishes / fold and put away laundry / clean my tub

sreekanth850 1y ago

>Nobody wants to talk to an AI when they need support. We all HATE that! It is bad enough that when you need service and support you end up talking to someone on the other side of the planet who's using some kind of answer sheet with absolutely no clue on how to really help you. This is true from my personal experience. Had switched my fiber provider because, with my previous provider, i was never able to talk to a human.

serverlessmania 1y ago

"Less competent employees are often the ones promoting AI." I don't understand how this post is HN front page…

serverlessmania 1y ago

“Hype is harmful and deceptive.” Congratulations on identifying marketing exists. What’s next? You gonna blow the whistle on toothpaste commercials? Of course hype is driven by profit. That’s literally the point of business. But you know what else was hyped once? The internet. And electricity. And antibiotics. Being annoyed that people are excited about tech is not a worldview—it's a vibe. A really boring one.

serverlessmania 1y ago

“Modern tech hype mirrors medieval charlatans.” Ah, yes, the classic “this thing I don’t like is medieval alchemy” comparison. Because if you can’t refute the tools, just compare it to snake oil. It’s cute how this guy thinks he’s the only one who’s noticed not every AI startup is curing cancer. The tech world has always had grifters. That doesn’t mean the tools themselves are fake—it means some people are dumb and others are greedy, which is kind of how humanity works.

felipeerias 1y ago
Medieval alchemy gave us modern chemistry, just like ancient and medieval astrology gave us modern astronomy. The Enlightenment age brought about an increased interest in occultism right next to an increased interest in science, often by the same people. When a new knowledge area is starting out, it can be pretty hard to discriminate between the real and the imaginary.

serverlessmania 1y ago

“AI is misleading, there’s no actual intelligence.” Oh wow, you figured out “Artificial Intelligence” isn’t literal. You should tell the rest of the planet. Maybe we should rename it “Statistical Pattern Prediction Machines That Are Better at Your Job Than You Are.” It’s a mouthful, but more honest.

zhivota 1y ago

It's kind of funny to me how impossible it is to distinguish hype that's around an underlying technology that is going to really change things, and hype that is around an underlying technology that is not going to do anything. I think many people today are super jaded because they lived through IoT, crypto (a hype train that had tons of idiotic permutations), metaverse, voice as the future of all computing, and maybe more I'm forgetting. But don't let those experiences jade you to the fact that we have lived through multiple actual huge disruptions: Internet, mobile phones, social media, battery tech, solar and wind becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, and more. The fact is you just can't tell which is which, but I can say this - I never found any use in IoT or crypto or metaverse crap. But I find a lot of use out of LLMs. At the very least they are going to be a useful tool for a lot of things in the future. Whether they go further is independent of hype.