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Hopefully it's a sign of the bubble starting to pop. This is the same situation we had in the late 90s with the dot-com bubble. Many companies built on hype wit

by imiric 1y ago

Hopefully it's a sign of the bubble starting to pop. This is the same situation we had in the late 90s with the dot-com bubble. Many companies built on hype with lackluster products. So much so that it became a meme with zombo.com. We need an AI-bubble equivalent parody product.

voidfunc 1y ago
Anything is possible at ZomboCom, You can do anything at ZomboCom. Seems to be covered already!
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Oh man, I forgot about ZomboCom You're right. It would be a prime time to launch ZombAI
  - bombcar 1y ago
    ZomboCom has outlived five or six bubbles by my count, and still as good as ever!
- Xmd5a 1y ago
  Still up! https://zombo.com/ https://zombo.com/
stephenr 1y ago
Don't be silly. Just because the Crypto/Blockchain promises of grandeur turned out to be mostly nothing, and the "fuck regulation, we are all the <hotel, taxi driver, you name it>" "gig economy" companies are losing customers as they show their true colours, and the AI bubble starts to burst, that doesn't mean that over-hyped niche "technologies" can't rake in millions of some poor VC investors money. It just requires lateral thought. Pay the completely untrained gig-workers peanuts to review AI written code to create a universal blockchain "bank without borders". I mean what could possibly go wrong?
- imiric 1y ago
  To push back at your obvious facetiousness, I do think that both cryptocurrencies and machine learning are very powerful and useful technologies. Underneath the scammers, grifters and investors that jump on the hype train for their get-rich-quick schemes, and the general public that falls for it and fuels the hype train, both technologies have solid reasons for existing, and can be generally very useful to humanity. So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them. What we do need, as with any novel technology, is oversight and regulation. Which is difficult this time around when the grifters are also the ones in power.
  - jamiejquinn 1y ago
    ML I get, but what do you think the legitimate value of crypto is to humanity?
    - c0redump 1y ago
      There isn’t any
    - imiric 1y ago
      You seriously can't think of any legitimate value that an entirely digital currency can have? Try asking an LLM. I'm not going to regurgitate what can be easily found elsewhere, or just deduced with a bit of thinking. The constant groupthink negativity around this topic on HN is exhausting. It's just as bad as the hype.
      - stephenr 1y ago
        "Try asking an automated hallucination system without the ability to reason why something is a good idea, I can't be bothered to make my own argument"
        imiric 1y ago
        "I'm too lazy to think and do my own research, so I'll post a lazy dismissal that agrees with the hivemind."
einsteinx2 1y ago
I feel like we’ve had two already with the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin. So many company got funded with obscene amounts of money though, so I think we still have dozens more coming soon. Though I imagine a lot of them will be quieter failures having not even gotten to a product launch yet.
- imiric 1y ago
  I don't think those are good examples, though. They were just ahead of their time, and poorly implemented. But an AI assistant that's accurate, immediately available, easier to use than a smartphone app, with better ergonomics, that integrates with other services ("agentic"), etc., is a billion-dollar idea. Someone will eventually crack this problem and produce a product that everyone will want. Just like Apple did with the iPhone, it will take a few years of lackluster products to get there. It's a matter of the tech getting good enough, affordable enough, and for someone to put the pieces together in the right package.
  - Kwpolska 1y ago
    > accurate Never gonna happen. > easier to use than a smartphone app Google is pushing their Gemini to Android phones pretty hard. I upgraded my phone yesterday and Gemini wanted to take over my power button (no way). What's going to be easier than that?
    - rs186 1y ago
      Not to mention that a phone screen provides a fast, efficient output that is good for vast amount of information -- text, image or video, etc. If I need to know local weather for the next 5 hours, a glance at the screen is much more efficient than waiting for AI to summarize that for me. There are objectively situations where other widgets (and other ways to interact) can be helpful, e.g. if my hands are full of stuff, or when I am lying on my bed and too lazy to pick up my phone. But those situations are very limited. Amazon has learned the hard lesson that people don't really use Alexa other than a smart timer, after billions of dollars of investment. I don't see how that changes any time soon.
datavirtue 1y ago
Why does everyone always want the bubble to pop?
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  I want the bubble to pop so we can start figuring out how to use LLMs in an actual productive way instead of just trying desperately to bolt them into every workflow because we're chasing the hype
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

by imiric 1y ago

voidfunc 1y ago

Anything is possible at ZomboCom, You can do anything at ZomboCom. Seems to be covered already!

bluefirebrand 1y ago
Oh man, I forgot about ZomboCom You're right. It would be a prime time to launch ZombAI
- bombcar 1y ago
  ZomboCom has outlived five or six bubbles by my count, and still as good as ever!
Xmd5a 1y ago
Still up! https://zombo.com/ https://zombo.com/

stephenr 1y ago

Don't be silly. Just because the Crypto/Blockchain promises of grandeur turned out to be mostly nothing, and the "fuck regulation, we are all the <hotel, taxi driver, you name it>" "gig economy" companies are losing customers as they show their true colours, and the AI bubble starts to burst, that doesn't mean that over-hyped niche "technologies" can't rake in millions of some poor VC investors money. It just requires lateral thought. Pay the completely untrained gig-workers peanuts to review AI written code to create a universal blockchain "bank without borders". I mean what could possibly go wrong?

imiric 1y ago
To push back at your obvious facetiousness, I do think that both cryptocurrencies and machine learning are very powerful and useful technologies. Underneath the scammers, grifters and investors that jump on the hype train for their get-rich-quick schemes, and the general public that falls for it and fuels the hype train, both technologies have solid reasons for existing, and can be generally very useful to humanity. So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them. What we do need, as with any novel technology, is oversight and regulation. Which is difficult this time around when the grifters are also the ones in power.
- jamiejquinn 1y ago
  ML I get, but what do you think the legitimate value of crypto is to humanity?
  - c0redump 1y ago
    There isn’t any
  - imiric 1y ago
    You seriously can't think of any legitimate value that an entirely digital currency can have? Try asking an LLM. I'm not going to regurgitate what can be easily found elsewhere, or just deduced with a bit of thinking. The constant groupthink negativity around this topic on HN is exhausting. It's just as bad as the hype.
    - stephenr 1y ago
      "Try asking an automated hallucination system without the ability to reason why something is a good idea, I can't be bothered to make my own argument"
      - imiric 1y ago
        "I'm too lazy to think and do my own research, so I'll post a lazy dismissal that agrees with the hivemind."

einsteinx2 1y ago

I feel like we’ve had two already with the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin. So many company got funded with obscene amounts of money though, so I think we still have dozens more coming soon. Though I imagine a lot of them will be quieter failures having not even gotten to a product launch yet.

imiric 1y ago
I don't think those are good examples, though. They were just ahead of their time, and poorly implemented. But an AI assistant that's accurate, immediately available, easier to use than a smartphone app, with better ergonomics, that integrates with other services ("agentic"), etc., is a billion-dollar idea. Someone will eventually crack this problem and produce a product that everyone will want. Just like Apple did with the iPhone, it will take a few years of lackluster products to get there. It's a matter of the tech getting good enough, affordable enough, and for someone to put the pieces together in the right package.
- Kwpolska 1y ago
  > accurate Never gonna happen. > easier to use than a smartphone app Google is pushing their Gemini to Android phones pretty hard. I upgraded my phone yesterday and Gemini wanted to take over my power button (no way). What's going to be easier than that?
  - rs186 1y ago
    Not to mention that a phone screen provides a fast, efficient output that is good for vast amount of information -- text, image or video, etc. If I need to know local weather for the next 5 hours, a glance at the screen is much more efficient than waiting for AI to summarize that for me. There are objectively situations where other widgets (and other ways to interact) can be helpful, e.g. if my hands are full of stuff, or when I am lying on my bed and too lazy to pick up my phone. But those situations are very limited. Amazon has learned the hard lesson that people don't really use Alexa other than a smart timer, after billions of dollars of investment. I don't see how that changes any time soon.

datavirtue 1y ago

Why does everyone always want the bubble to pop?

bluefirebrand 1y ago
I want the bubble to pop so we can start figuring out how to use LLMs in an actual productive way instead of just trying desperately to bolt them into every workflow because we're chasing the hype

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]