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I liked this analysis quite a bit. A few reactions: (1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary for a tech company to stop caring about the

I liked this analysis quite a bit. A few reactions: (1) I don't think a tech company having a monopoly is necessary for a tech company to stop caring about their customers and focus on hype instead. Plenty of public tech companies do this, just to chase stock price and investors. (2) It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. Interesting. I think ultimately companies may be misguided -- because, in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. And hype bandwagoners may fail because, long-term, customers don't like their products. In other words, this is a bad strategy. (3) what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential. The hype train itself and the crazy amount of money being spent on it almost defacto means it IS important and WILL be important. It's like a market and consumer interest has been created by the hype machine itself.

nottorp 1y ago
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs. What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.
- api 1y ago
  "A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard. Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    > They can clearly do things that involve reasoning No. > but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. The internet is just bigger than what a single human can encounter. Plus a single human isn't likely to be able to afford to pay for all that training data the "AI" peddlers have pirated :)
    - peterlk 1y ago
      A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion. The truth is much more interesting and subtle than “no”. Directed stochastic processes that reach a correct conclusion of novel logic problems more often than chance means that something interesting is happening, and it’s sensible to call that process “reasoning”. Does it mean that we’ve reached AGI? No. Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do? No. But dismissing “reasoning” out of hand also dismisses genuinely interesting phenomena.
      - LamaOfRuin 1y ago
        Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something that the generative AI industry has succeeded in convincing many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone has to accede to that change. It's true that something interesting is happening. GP did not dispute that. That doesn't make it reasoning, and many people still believe that words should have meaning in order to discuss things intelligently. Language is ultimately a living thing and will inevitably change. This usually involves people fighting the change and no one know ahead of time which side will win.
        ToValueFunfetti 1y ago
        It would be useful to supply a definition if your point is that others' definition is wrong. Are you saying they don't deduct inferences from premises? Is it "deduct" that you take issue with?
        zahlman 1y ago
Snarwin 1y ago
> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.
- leptons 1y ago
  The only thing I find bad about Google search now is their "AI" summary, which is often just wrong. I can deal with ads in the search results, I expect them, and I have no doubt ads will be shown in ChatGPT search results too, because they are bleeding money. And ChatGPT is under no obligation to show you anything with any accuracy, which is what the underlying tech is based on - guessing. Thanks, I'll take my chances with actual search results.
  - sheiyei 1y ago
    I think AI evangelists avoid talking about search because AI is why every internet search engine sucks. I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and when trying to find answers to nontrivial questions I get ONLY AI spam sites as results. (Come up with 1500 semi-specific SEO-friendly articles vaguely relating to subject the theme of website N. Then repeat until N=100 And shortly enough, AI is not even going to help with searching – it will eat its own s*t and offer that as answers. Unless the AI giants find some >99.99% way to filter out their own toxic waste from the training data.
    - strange_quark 1y ago
      What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk about it is because the second they frame "AI" as slightly better search, it invites all sorts of unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the hype because now you're talking about a better version of a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're going to be talking about next year when agents don't work.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      There was a period I remember fondly when the SEO slop was still mostly human generated because AI couldn't quite do it yet, and I was getting much better results from DDG than from Google. Now it's all despair-inducing.
jerf 1y ago
"what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential." The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001. (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.) I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.) It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or 2025 Internet) that is actually of value really ought to be able to run on hardware that old. Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient CPUs.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
zahlman 1y ago
> It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright. > in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.
mattigames 1y ago
"Created a better search experience" sure, just like eating human meat would create a better dinning experience because there is a lot of humans near you, at the end of the day what "AI" is doing is butchering a bunch of websites and giving you a blend, in the progress making you no longer required to enter those websites that needed you to do so to survive, because they are monetized by third party ads or some paid offering.
jnpnj 1y ago
And there's a part of me that kinda think "lots of money will mean some large scale investments in labs that might result in some rare findings". Even though the hype + investor chase feels very shallow to me too.
z3ugma 1y ago
Even if hype bandwagon fails in the long term it is still probably an optimal investment strategy which is IMO why we see so much enshittification. If there is 1 ChatGPT or Amazon- level product a decade, you are not likely to be an early investor in it. A reliable play is to invest in many companies, enshittify them, extract small rents reliably rather than betting the farm on a good product.

nottorp 1y ago

> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience Funny enough, no "AI" prophet is mentioning that, in spite of it being the most useful thing about LLMs. What I wonder is how long it will last. LLMs are being fed their own content by now, and someone will surely want to "monetize" it after the VC money starts to dry up a bit. At least two paths to entshittification.

api 1y ago
"A junior intern who has memorized the Internet" is how one member of our team described it and it's still one of the best descriptions of these things I've heard. Sometimes I think these things are more like JPEGs for knowledge expressed as language. They're more AM (artificial memory) than AI (artificial intelligence). It's a blurry line though. They can clearly do things that involve reasoning, but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. So a JPEG is an imperfect analogy since lossy image compressors can't do any reasoning about images.
- nottorp 1y ago
  > They can clearly do things that involve reasoning No. > but it's arguably because that's latent in the training data. The internet is just bigger than what a single human can encounter. Plus a single human isn't likely to be able to afford to pay for all that training data the "AI" peddlers have pirated :)
  - peterlk 1y ago
    A dismissive “no” is not a helpful addition to this discussion. The truth is much more interesting and subtle than “no”. Directed stochastic processes that reach a correct conclusion of novel logic problems more often than chance means that something interesting is happening, and it’s sensible to call that process “reasoning”. Does it mean that we’ve reached AGI? No. Does it mean the process reflects exactly what humans do? No. But dismissing “reasoning” out of hand also dismisses genuinely interesting phenomena.
    - LamaOfRuin 1y ago
      Only if you redefine "reasoning". This is something that the generative AI industry has succeeded in convincing many people of, but that doesn't mean everyone has to accede to that change. It's true that something interesting is happening. GP did not dispute that. That doesn't make it reasoning, and many people still believe that words should have meaning in order to discuss things intelligently. Language is ultimately a living thing and will inevitably change. This usually involves people fighting the change and no one know ahead of time which side will win.
      - ToValueFunfetti 1y ago
        It would be useful to supply a definition if your point is that others' definition is wrong. Are you saying they don't deduct inferences from premises? Is it "deduct" that you take issue with?
        zahlman 1y ago

Snarwin 1y ago

> ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience Or perhaps because Google created a worse search experience.

leptons 1y ago
The only thing I find bad about Google search now is their "AI" summary, which is often just wrong. I can deal with ads in the search results, I expect them, and I have no doubt ads will be shown in ChatGPT search results too, because they are bleeding money. And ChatGPT is under no obligation to show you anything with any accuracy, which is what the underlying tech is based on - guessing. Thanks, I'll take my chances with actual search results.
- sheiyei 1y ago
  I think AI evangelists avoid talking about search because AI is why every internet search engine sucks. I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and when trying to find answers to nontrivial questions I get ONLY AI spam sites as results. (Come up with 1500 semi-specific SEO-friendly articles vaguely relating to subject the theme of website N. Then repeat until N=100 And shortly enough, AI is not even going to help with searching – it will eat its own s*t and offer that as answers. Unless the AI giants find some >99.99% way to filter out their own toxic waste from the training data.
  - strange_quark 1y ago
    What you're saying is totally correct about AI slop polluting the web, but the reason they don't want to talk about it is because the second they frame "AI" as slightly better search, it invites all sorts of unfavorable financial comparisons. It also deflates the hype because now you're talking about a better version of a thing everyone is familiar with instead of some magical new buzzword like "agent" or "RAG" or whatever we're going to be talking about next year when agents don't work.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    There was a period I remember fondly when the SEO slop was still mostly human generated because AI couldn't quite do it yet, and I was getting much better results from DDG than from Google. Now it's all despair-inducing.

jerf 1y ago

"what's weird about AI -- and I guess all hype trains -- is how part of me feels like it's hype, but part of me also sees the value in investing in it and its potential." The DotCom bubble is an instructive historical example. Pretty much every wild promise made during the bubble has manifested, right down to delivering pet food. It's just that for the bubble to have been worthwhile, we would essentially have had the internet of 2015 or 2020 delivered in 2001. (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.) I don't know that the AI bubble will have a similar 20-year lag, but I also think it's out over its skis. What we have now is both extremely impressive, but also not justifying the valuations being poured into it in the here & now. There's no contradiction there. In fact if you look at history there's been all sorts of similar cases of promising technologies being grotesquely over-invested in, even though they were transformative and amazing. If you want to go back further in history, the railroad bubble also has some similarities to the Dot Com bubble. It's not that railroad wasn't in fact a completely transformative technology, it's just that the random hodgepodge of a hundred companies slapping random sizes and shapes of track in half-random places wasn't worth the valuations they were given. The promise took decades longer to manifest.

zahlman 1y ago
> (And because people forget, it is not too far off to say that would be like trying to deliver the internet of 2020 on machines with specs comparable to a Nintendo Wii. I'm trying to pick a game console as a sort of touchpoint, and there probably isn't a perfect comparison, but based on the machines I had in 2000 the specs are roughly inline with a Wii, at least by the numbers. Though the Wii would have murdered my 2000-era laptop on graphics.) It depresses me to think how much of the 2020 Internet (or 2025 Internet) that is actually of value really ought to be able to run on hardware that old. Or so I imagine, anyway. I wonder if anyone's tried to benchmark simple CSS transitions and SVG rendering on ancient CPUs.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

zahlman 1y ago

> It's weirdly the opposite mindset that Bezos talked about in that famous old video where he talks about "creating the best experience for the customer" is his business strategy. A big part of hype as a business strategy is to convince potential customers that you intend to create the best experience for them. And the simplest approach to that task is to say it outright. > in fact, ChatGPT is succeeding because they created a better search experience. Sure. But they don't market it like that, and a large fraction of people reporting success with ChatGPT don't seem to be characterizing their experiences that way. Even if you discount the people explicitly attempting to, well, chat with it.

mattigames 1y ago

"Created a better search experience" sure, just like eating human meat would create a better dinning experience because there is a lot of humans near you, at the end of the day what "AI" is doing is butchering a bunch of websites and giving you a blend, in the progress making you no longer required to enter those websites that needed you to do so to survive, because they are monetized by third party ads or some paid offering.

jnpnj 1y ago

And there's a part of me that kinda think "lots of money will mean some large scale investments in labs that might result in some rare findings". Even though the hype + investor chase feels very shallow to me too.

z3ugma 1y ago

Even if hype bandwagon fails in the long term it is still probably an optimal investment strategy which is IMO why we see so much enshittification. If there is 1 ChatGPT or Amazon- level product a decade, you are not likely to be an early investor in it. A reliable play is to invest in many companies, enshittify them, extract small rents reliably rather than betting the farm on a good product.