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> So, this is how I’m thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the predictions. I’m done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by vibes. A lot of the predictions co

> So, this is how I’m thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the predictions. I’m done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by vibes. A lot of the predictions come from interviews and presentations with top tech executives. Their job is to increase the perceived value of their product, not to offer an objective assessment. I've gotten a lot of value out of reading the views of experienced engineers; overall they like the tech, but they do not think it is a sentient alien that will delete our jobs. I have also gotten a lot of value out of Cembalest's recent "eyes on the market", which looks at the economic side of this AI push.

MichaelRo 9mo ago
Snake oil salesmen will predict that "this will be the year when the snake oil you buy from us will cure all ailments". Nothing new under the sun.
- tempodox 9mo ago
  And publications can expect more readers for breathless hype articles than for sober analyses.
- Verdex 9mo ago
  Interestingly enough, my understanding is that some snakes in Asia can be used to produce oil that helps joint problems. American snakes weren't useful for this. So something that was sort of useful in a niche application was co-opted by people who didn't know how to make it work and then ultra hyped. The parallels are spot on.
  - irishcoffee 9mo ago
    That’s actually how it started. Some water snake native to china, when the oil is extracted it contains omega-3 fatty acid, which does help arthritis. It was turned into a scam in the west. Seems like a lot of work to get omega-3 in a consumable form.
  - tdeck 9mo ago
    The famous "snake oil" salesman sold jars filled with beef fat mixed with capsaicin and turpentine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Stanley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Stanley
bonesss 9mo ago
In the gap between reality and executive speak around LLMs, I’m wondering about motives. Getting executives, junior devs, HR, and middle management hooked onto an advice and document template machine owned and operated by your corporation would seemingly have a huge upside for an entity like Microsoft. Their infatuation might be more about how profitable such arrangements would be versus any meaningful productivity improvement for developers. Like, in ways that BizTalk, Dynamics, and SharePoint attempt to capture business processes onto a pay-for-play MS stack, and all benefit when being pitched to non-technical customers, Copilot provides an ever evolving sycophantic exec-centred channel to push and entangle it all as MS sees fit. Having all parts of your business divulge in real-time through saveable chats every part of your business, strategy, tooling, and process to MS servers and Azure services is itself a pretty stunning arrangement. Imagining those same services directly selling busy customers entangling integrations, or trendy azure services, through freewheeling MCP-like glue, all inline in that customers own business processes? It sounds like tech exec nirvana, automated self-directed sales. They don’t need job deleting sentience to make the share price go up and rationalize this LLM push. They are far more aware of the limitations than we…
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  > They are far more aware of the limitations than we… Every individual only cares about their paycheck and promotion. They will happily ignore their knowledge of the limitations if it means squeezing out an extra resume bulletpoint, paycheck or promotion, even if it causes the company to go bankrupt down the line (by that time they would've jumped ship somewhere else anyway).
- biophysboy 9mo ago
  Weren't we trusting MS with our business info before AI with cloud platforms like Azure? Not saying "eh don't worry about it" - I'm just asking why I should be more worried than before. These businesses need subscribers which means they need our trust..
tgv 9mo ago
> Their job is to increase the perceived value of their product I don't agree. Your job cannot be "lie to the customer." They may see this as the easy way to get more money and justify their comfy position, but it is not their job.
- noodletheworld 9mo ago
  No one said anything about lying. Their job is to make the company successful. Part of success is raising funds and boosting share price. That is their job, and how do you imagine they can do that? Sound kind of glum and down about the company prospects? Do not make be laugh. Even if the company is literally haemorrhaging cash and has < week of runway left, senior executives are often so far up their own basses and surrounded by yes men, that they often honestly believe they can turn things around. Its often not about will-fully lying. Its just delusional belief and faith in something that is very unlikely. (Last minute turn arounds and DSA do exist, but like lottery players, seeing the very few people who do win and mimicking them does not make you into a winner; most of the time)
  - jennyholzer3 9mo ago
    [dead]
- albatross79 9mo ago
  Elon proved that "corporate puffery" is more valuable than any product you make or could make. The job of CEOs now is to generate science fiction fantasies and sell those to the public.
- biophysboy 9mo ago
  I overstated. To clarify, I think a major purpose of those public interviews/conferences is to increase the perceived value of the product. Entrepreneurship, essentially. Taking chances, speculating, thinking about possibilities, etc.
scott_w 9mo ago
> I've gotten a lot of value out of reading the views of experienced engineers; overall they like the tech, but they do not think it is a sentient alien that will delete our jobs. I normally see things the same way you do, however I did have a conversation with a podiatrist yesterday that gave me food for thought. His belief is that certain medical roles will disappear as they'll become redundant. In his case, he mentioned radiology and he presented his case as thus: A consultant gets a report + X-Ray from the radiologist. They read the report and confirm what they're seeing against the images. They won't take the report blindly. What changes is that machines have been learning to interpret the images and are able to use an LLM to generate the report. These reports tend not to miss things but will over-report issues. As a consultant will verify the report for themselves before operating, they no longer need the radiologist. If the machine reports a non-existent tumour, they'll see there's no tumour.
- Verdex 9mo ago
  I've seen this sort of thing a few times. "Yes, I'm sure AI can do that other job that's not mine over there.". Now maybe foot doctors work closer to radiologists than I'm aware of. But the radiologists that I've talked to aren't impressed with the work AI had managed to do in their field. Apparently there are one or two incredibly easy tasks that they can sort of do, but it comprises a very small amount of the job of an actual radiologist.
  - scott_w 9mo ago
    > But the radiologists that I've talked to aren't impressed with the work AI had managed to do in their field. Just so I understand correctly: is it over-reporting problems that aren't there or is it missing blindingly obvious problems? The latter is obviously a problem and, I agree, would completely invalidate it as a useful tool. The former sounded, the way it was explained to me, more like a matter of degrees.
    - Verdex 9mo ago
      I'm afraid I don't have the details. I was reading about certain lung issues the AI was doing a good job on and thought, "oh well that's it for radiology." But the radiologist chimed in with, "yeah that's the easiest thing we do and the rates are still not acceptable, meanwhile we keep trying to get it to do anything harder and the success rates are completely unworkable."

MichaelRo 9mo ago

Snake oil salesmen will predict that "this will be the year when the snake oil you buy from us will cure all ailments". Nothing new under the sun.

tempodox 9mo ago
And publications can expect more readers for breathless hype articles than for sober analyses.
Verdex 9mo ago
Interestingly enough, my understanding is that some snakes in Asia can be used to produce oil that helps joint problems. American snakes weren't useful for this. So something that was sort of useful in a niche application was co-opted by people who didn't know how to make it work and then ultra hyped. The parallels are spot on.
- irishcoffee 9mo ago
  That’s actually how it started. Some water snake native to china, when the oil is extracted it contains omega-3 fatty acid, which does help arthritis. It was turned into a scam in the west. Seems like a lot of work to get omega-3 in a consumable form.
- tdeck 9mo ago
  The famous "snake oil" salesman sold jars filled with beef fat mixed with capsaicin and turpentine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Stanley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Stanley

bonesss 9mo ago

In the gap between reality and executive speak around LLMs, I’m wondering about motives. Getting executives, junior devs, HR, and middle management hooked onto an advice and document template machine owned and operated by your corporation would seemingly have a huge upside for an entity like Microsoft. Their infatuation might be more about how profitable such arrangements would be versus any meaningful productivity improvement for developers. Like, in ways that BizTalk, Dynamics, and SharePoint attempt to capture business processes onto a pay-for-play MS stack, and all benefit when being pitched to non-technical customers, Copilot provides an ever evolving sycophantic exec-centred channel to push and entangle it all as MS sees fit. Having all parts of your business divulge in real-time through saveable chats every part of your business, strategy, tooling, and process to MS servers and Azure services is itself a pretty stunning arrangement. Imagining those same services directly selling busy customers entangling integrations, or trendy azure services, through freewheeling MCP-like glue, all inline in that customers own business processes? It sounds like tech exec nirvana, automated self-directed sales. They don’t need job deleting sentience to make the share price go up and rationalize this LLM push. They are far more aware of the limitations than we…

Nextgrid 9mo ago
> They are far more aware of the limitations than we… Every individual only cares about their paycheck and promotion. They will happily ignore their knowledge of the limitations if it means squeezing out an extra resume bulletpoint, paycheck or promotion, even if it causes the company to go bankrupt down the line (by that time they would've jumped ship somewhere else anyway).
biophysboy 9mo ago
Weren't we trusting MS with our business info before AI with cloud platforms like Azure? Not saying "eh don't worry about it" - I'm just asking why I should be more worried than before. These businesses need subscribers which means they need our trust..

tgv 9mo ago

> Their job is to increase the perceived value of their product I don't agree. Your job cannot be "lie to the customer." They may see this as the easy way to get more money and justify their comfy position, but it is not their job.

noodletheworld 9mo ago
No one said anything about lying. Their job is to make the company successful. Part of success is raising funds and boosting share price. That is their job, and how do you imagine they can do that? Sound kind of glum and down about the company prospects? Do not make be laugh. Even if the company is literally haemorrhaging cash and has < week of runway left, senior executives are often so far up their own basses and surrounded by yes men, that they often honestly believe they can turn things around. Its often not about will-fully lying. Its just delusional belief and faith in something that is very unlikely. (Last minute turn arounds and DSA do exist, but like lottery players, seeing the very few people who do win and mimicking them does not make you into a winner; most of the time)
- jennyholzer3 9mo ago
  [dead]
albatross79 9mo ago
Elon proved that "corporate puffery" is more valuable than any product you make or could make. The job of CEOs now is to generate science fiction fantasies and sell those to the public.
biophysboy 9mo ago
I overstated. To clarify, I think a major purpose of those public interviews/conferences is to increase the perceived value of the product. Entrepreneurship, essentially. Taking chances, speculating, thinking about possibilities, etc.

scott_w 9mo ago

> I've gotten a lot of value out of reading the views of experienced engineers; overall they like the tech, but they do not think it is a sentient alien that will delete our jobs. I normally see things the same way you do, however I did have a conversation with a podiatrist yesterday that gave me food for thought. His belief is that certain medical roles will disappear as they'll become redundant. In his case, he mentioned radiology and he presented his case as thus: A consultant gets a report + X-Ray from the radiologist. They read the report and confirm what they're seeing against the images. They won't take the report blindly. What changes is that machines have been learning to interpret the images and are able to use an LLM to generate the report. These reports tend not to miss things but will over-report issues. As a consultant will verify the report for themselves before operating, they no longer need the radiologist. If the machine reports a non-existent tumour, they'll see there's no tumour.

Verdex 9mo ago
I've seen this sort of thing a few times. "Yes, I'm sure AI can do that other job that's not mine over there.". Now maybe foot doctors work closer to radiologists than I'm aware of. But the radiologists that I've talked to aren't impressed with the work AI had managed to do in their field. Apparently there are one or two incredibly easy tasks that they can sort of do, but it comprises a very small amount of the job of an actual radiologist.
- scott_w 9mo ago
  > But the radiologists that I've talked to aren't impressed with the work AI had managed to do in their field. Just so I understand correctly: is it over-reporting problems that aren't there or is it missing blindingly obvious problems? The latter is obviously a problem and, I agree, would completely invalidate it as a useful tool. The former sounded, the way it was explained to me, more like a matter of degrees.
  - Verdex 9mo ago
    I'm afraid I don't have the details. I was reading about certain lung issues the AI was doing a good job on and thought, "oh well that's it for radiology." But the radiologist chimed in with, "yeah that's the easiest thing we do and the rates are still not acceptable, meanwhile we keep trying to get it to do anything harder and the success rates are completely unworkable."