Is this a recent thing, or am I simply not remembering similar vaporware hypestorms of the past?
I've been using ChatGPT for the last week or two and it's not got a single coding question I've asked it right. Seems alright as a 'rubber duck' for generating ideas and seems okish for creative writing but for not a hell of a lot else at the minute.
The visual AI art stuff does seem worth the hype though but yeah, I'm feeling burnt out on this shit too. Based on everyone I speak to, I think the majority of people are. The pandemic probably didn't help.
I do not feel that way about GPT-4-level AI. I am continually blown away by the value I get when I use it. I ask it programming questions, and while it doesn't always get things 100% right, it saves me a ton of time. I've asked it medical questions (I used the prompt suggested by this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35319988), and it was invaluable. I even showed the chat to my doctor, and while I could tell at the beginning she was feeling a bit "Oh lord, I thought it was bad with 'Dr Google', now it's going to be much worse", but by the end of it I felt she was even a bit shaken by how good the responses were.
I totally agree there is a ton of snake-oil with respect to "BS AI" pitches, and it seems like there are lots of companies calling everything under the sun "AI". But that doesn't mean there isn't "real" AI, and GPT-4 has been the most mind-blowing piece of technology I've ever used.
Starting somewhere around the 90s and ever since, they desperately need to pull a rabbit every few years to prop up the stocks.
Same with many chemical discoveries in the 1800s, and with nuclear discoveries in the 1950s.
The snake oil salesmen will always race to some new tech to try and make a quick buck. Partially because the new tech actually does do some interesting things and partially because it's new enough no one can call them on it quite yet.
Even now there are tons of new science and tech in other fields that the general public are more convinced than ever work for health, etc. And at best are hopeful thinking and at worst are massive scams which are straight out hurting millions.
Back in the day, I got all of my gaming news out of a physical magazine. That means people with a hyped-up scammy product had no way of reaching me unless they could convince the writer at that magazine that they were legit.
Nowadays, all of the grifters can email me directly and/or create SEO-optimized websites and/or pay Google/Facebook to shove ads into my face.
The democratization of communication has made scams much more annoying.
Android flashlight apps, Facebook personality quizzes, Amazon affiliate spam, drop shipping, pay-to-win games. The shining, prestigious "platforms" are necessarily in symbiosis with their ecosystems of (mostly) slimy, bottom-feeding tenants.
Rails discourse, NodeJS discourse, MongoDB discourse, AWS discourse, Docker discourse, Agile discourse, TDD discourse, etc. Tech has always had cycles of hype, counter-hype, disillusionment, and eventually sorting tools and approaches into their proper niches in view of tradeoffs.
Back then, the internet was made of people with intent. I remember the first time I rode a train where two passengers next to me read out a URL for a local newspaper and how it was going to change their world. Before that, I don't think I actually heard someone spell out "w, w, w, yes 3 of them, dot..."
Since then, the web industry has gain tremendous growth, roles were created. Roles that frankly, don't need to exist.
Let me remind you of SEO experts, Crypto bros, Cybersec "one click security guys" that don't understand TCP, reverse proxying, NAT, incapable of knowing which IP range is on the VPN, but are fully qualified...
Recruiters since forever, 8 front-end developers for 1 SPA, one dude dedicated to the build system! AI prompters are around the corners...
A cyber security team operating "WAF" - the idea that we are so far gone from knowing what runs on our own servers that we need to firewall them.
30X slower code because it's abstracted by virtual pods, running in virtual machines, operating virtual cpus...
Social media experts: FML!
Social medias have given every village idiots a loud planetary voice. Search is seen as the true north, fuelled by echo chambers and agendas. Linkedin is a dystopian nightmare.
There is definitely a bubble, and it has blown so far out of proportions we can't even see the surface anymore! If you're one of the guys that call BS on any of it, you're being isolated as a mad man. But, just, look around.
It's okay though, AI generated content will destroy what is left of the internet of information. Village idiots will now have not only a planet wide reach, but they will also write like nobel laureates!
That said, take a look at the Gartner hype cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle The same game has been playing out across varying contexts over a long time. This is nothing specific to "tech" -- "tech" just happens to be a brand with positive connotations, for today.
For a deeper take on the dynamics of the evolution of a new social trend, see https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths Once tech became "cool", the scene would inevitably expand beyond the "geeks" to attract people would would want to exploit it selfishly.
If there actually was a pill that would actually make your penis bigger, would it:
A) be advertised only on the high number cable channels late at night?
or
B) Be shouted from the rooftops?
So, develop a healthy sense of skepticism about everything you see on the media. It's nothing new.
That said, humans do have a tendency to romanticise the past - forgetting the bad and the weird.
The SV/SFBay idea of success is what the rest of us would call a pump and dump: burn a bunch of money to drive existing enterprises in the rest out of the country out of business; while providing at best marginal, and usually no, product benefit to consumers; and dumping the money losing venture on institutional and retail investors.
That's success. "Exiting." Not building something new, valuable, or sustainable.
"Oh, but wait, there are sustainable businesses," you might say. With few exceptions, they are advertising companies. Advertising is a fixed pool drawn from the real economy; all they've done is divert it from existing businesses.
Just make sure to pretend you're changing the world.
And before that, there was a tail of previous AI hype cycle. I remember training an actual neural network on IBM PC 80286, as our school competition project, back in 1992.
And before that, the minicomputers boom, but I’m not old enough to remember it. VAXen and Usenet, this sort of thing.
Hype cycles are the natural state of affairs in tech.
Let’s take a bridge as a comparison. It’s also technical but it’s understood very well and there not much variability. A bridge doesn’t serve too many purposes. Mainly to allow heavy objects to move across something.
Software on the other hand is complex. Rather simple applications can have many purposes and even more internal execution paths. Sure, we need to develop a software just once. So all the engineers concentrate on a single thing, whereas we need many civil engineers to build and maintain the bridges. Apparently, it still doesn’t work.
Usually for software, there is no liability. Imagine civil engineers building bridges like software engineers. Maybe they would all look different and fancy and we would run around to take nice pictures of them. Also they would break down much more and people would just expect it and live with that.
(1) Big Tech in the U.S. is like the way the car industry was in the 1970s in the U.S. Still thinking it is the best of the world and many onlookers agreeing but deeply rotten inside.
Facebook and Google, for instance, are still riding high on monopolies in two sided markets. Advertisers have nowhere to go because the audience is there, but without revenue from advertisers, new publishers and social media can't fund efforts that would get them an audience.
Amazon, Netflix, and Uber on the other hand look "successful" because they are overcapitalized and able to lose money on all or some of their product lines. You'd have an easy time selling half-priced taxi rides too if you had $25 billion of investor's money to spend.
The real innovation in e-Commerce and social media is happening in India and China because the markets aren't locked up tight by monopolists there, that's the real story behind Tik Tok. AMZN was a leader in e-commerce 25 years ago but... That was 25 years ago and that is how you say "Sears and Roebucks" in Internet time!
(2) Crypto and NFT are obviously an effort to move money from one pocket to another without any value being created or transferred, not much more to say there except...
(3) Facebook has been chasing the virtual reality dream for quite some time, you might recall there was an AR scam being pushed by "Magic Leap" in the last decade and Hololens was a thing too, the Army even was talking about buying a Hololens for each and every soldier until they discovered that soldiers couldn't shoot straight while wearing one.
Last year though, Facebook got universally panned when they linked their successful efforts in VR Hardware to their unsuccessful efforts in VR Software (Hint: Horizon Worlds isn't fun, it's like a summer camp where you're expected to entertain itself) and with the NFT moment. It was a big mistake. See the following for a good analysis of why "the metaverse" is doomed as it is conceptualized:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q
(4) Eliezer Yudkowsky is up in arms about ChatGPT because ChatGPT is superhuman at bullshitting and can bullshit better than he can! People who were hoping they could get rich without trying with NFTs now think ChatGPT can write their pitch deck. Medium.com is in crisis because the kind of person who was too lazy to maintain or promote a blog was always too lazy to write a blog.
What I'll say is this though. NLP stuff that was beyond state of the art at a startup I was working at 5 years ago is now easy, and if you look here
https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour
you'll see 13 uses of transformers listed and prompt-driven text generation is just 1 of them. Seduced by ChatGPT's bullshitting capabilities people will be amazed at the 70% accuracy of GPT-3, the 75% accuracy of GPT-4, the 77% accuracy of GPT-5, the 78% accuracy of GPT-6. People who learn how these models actually work how to train them on specific tasks will (a) run them on their own computers under their own control, (b) run models orders of magnitude smaller, (c) get 95%+ accuracy on well-specified problems with modest amounts of data, (d) have access to much better models 6 months from now.
It's because that's the bleeding edge of new information and laypeople can't know for sure what information is true and what isn't. That sets the stage perfectly for con artists.
Snake oil was scammy tech when it was sold by traveling medicine shows, before silicon snake oil was even imagined.
Just look at the huge number of failed game controllers that will "revolutionize" gaming,... or try watching an old computer show (eg. computer chronicles) where they are trying to hype and sell some "new, revolutionary" tech, that "everyone will use in a few years"...
Lots of things fit this unless you want to be insanely cynical and reductive. You can always construct some conspiracy theory about how say, someone working for Debian or at say the EFF is really, secretly, trying to pad their resume and, even if they don't admit it, chase after wealth with some future lucrative payout, but people in practical terms, have different motives. Some people work on say, astronomical data, because they want to work on astronomical data. They like having a roof over their head, but they're not looking for it to be made with gold.
Choose what you work on wisely with caution and discretion. If you want a yacht and a bugatti, go for it, have fun. But if you don't, then, really, just don't.
There are certainly scammy trends in tech, but I don't think this is that - except in the cases they're doing it to secure funding or sell stuff, and perhaps to benefit indirectly by hyping their sector.
Many of the names of technologies and companies have changed, but there is much that is familiar.
A: No, it started being this way when web usage reached the general population. I blame smartphones for that, but it was inevitable.
It is really difficult to suss out the winners and losers are going to be. VCs take the approach of spreading across as many bets as possible - hoping to get lucky. Companies will try to add the next big thing to their existing products to stay relevant (purely defensive maneuvers). Employees looking for jobs in the gold rush must either _really_ believe in the product/company they're working on or have the ability to move quickly off a sinking ship.
Tl;Dr it's always like this. Also it's not purely a bad thing - try to find ways to be positive.
Yes
No.