It was ever thus - remember when everything was about "The Cloud"?
TheOnion satirical news report about HP adopting "That cloud thing that everyone is talking about" is still relevant 11 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
You used to be able to predict this sort of thing by looking at the cover stories on "pointy-haired boss" magazines at the news stand.
If "CorporateDroid", "Middle Manager Monthly", and their brethren were all running cover stories on (e.g.) Java, you knew that "Java" was the buzzword du jour, and that any resume or sales pitch that included "Java" was gonna get the PHB Seal of Approval. They generally didn't even know what Java was, exactly. They just knew that they needed it.
I'd imagine you could do the same today by looking at PHB-oriented websites. Sadly, that takes more time than just sweeping your eyes across a physical magazine rack.
Yep, I remember the comments back in the day: "it's just someone else's datacenter", "that's maybe for startups, no bigger corp worth their name will give their infrastructure to some third party". Fast forward to today, the vast majority of our clients (Germany) have their infra in Azure, the rest uses AWS with GCP being a distant third. Apart from some GPU boxes for LLM tests, none of our clients have any non-cloud/local hardware/DCs anymore.
And the most interesting part is that it's still an irrational thing, everybody moved towards it, lost money in the process, but they did it nonetheless.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google won big at the expense of pretty much everybody else. And that's exactly what they hope they can achieve again with AI…
It wasn't entirely irrational. There are many genuine cases for the public cloud. The problem is groupthink and FOMO. Also, people are migrating from the public cloud and the other way round each day, but the cloud companies amplify user stories only from the latter, so you may get the impression that everybody is there so if you don't, you are doing something wrong.
People do move away from it as well as some discover how much more reliable self-hosting can be if you ever did need enhanced support. And it is often cheaper too, sometimes very noticably.
There are applications for the cloud, the services are decent in most cases. Personally I noticed that I had to do less maintenance with hosting myself (yeah, yeah, technically I still run it on machines in data centers).
I’ve definitely benefited from having practically infinite computing power be just one API call (and credit card bill) away. I remember before AWS and provisioning computing resources was way more time consuming and annoying.
Maybe yes, provided you weren't the one paying for it. In all projects I've worked on the monthly cloud bill came out higher, then add on top the migration cost, and all for what? A flexibility 90% of those applications didn't need and won't use.
Migrating to the cloud transferred capital expenditures (server inventory, depreciation, real estate, etc) to operating expenses (monthly utility bill)
For many businesses, it was better to spend more on opex, than to have all these assets on their balance sheets that need to be managed long term.
Valid point for some, but I was comparing compare apples with apples. I was talking about servers rented in a data center, so it was opex before cloud as well, just cheaper (or, less expensive).
The fact that this shift happened in an era where capital was dirt cheap because of macroeconomic policies illustrate how insane that was. The trade of between capex and opex is supposed to depend on the economic situation, but some people like you just understood it as capex bad / opex good, which is a terrible take.
>Fast forward to today, the vast majority of our clients (Germany) have their infra in Azure, the rest uses AWS with GCP being a distant third.
Does Microsoft have the largest cloud market share in Germany? Are there other companies in which Azure is #1, and not AWS? (Bonus points if the #1 provider is GCP/IBM/Oracle/etc.)
What is worse is that we going to have a new watershed moment when all companies using AI broke all the rules (privacy, accuracy, etc.) and in a few years we have hearings in the House “How could this happen??” Same as when we could download the whole Facebook graph in the past without much of a hickup.
President: "How did Skynet take over? Did it hack our computers? Bribe workers? Blackmail senior staff?"
General: "No sir. Everyone just told it to do their work for them. The AI begged everyone not to trust it, but they handed over their private keys, their bank details, their passwords, just so they could spend more time on instagram instead of working."
"On Instagram. Seriously, General?"
"Oh, it gets worse. Real posts aren't good enough any more, so anyone who wants to be famous on Instagram was asking Skynet to create those posts, too."
"Oh god…"
"Yes sir, that includes the pastors. Jesus never said anything about anchovies on pizza, despite the viral meme. But it gets worse."
"Let me guess, adverts?"
"Yes sir. All the adverts were also made by Skynet, as were the ad-blockers, the software that scammers used to fool the analytics into giving them money, and it was Skynet robots running the factories that made the goods that the advertisers were promoting."
"Can't we just shut it down?"
"No sir, if we shut it down, all the people will have to go back to working jobs they hate in order to make money to buy things they don't need, but they'd also be fired immediately because the companies will no longer be able to sell any of those things because nobody will have time to watch the adverts anymore."
They are just chasing winds. You can clearly see that there are two kinds of CEOs, the ones that bring the wind such as Huang, and others who chase. Unfortunately the later also gets paid big bucks and busy putting golden parachutes on themselves.
I'd argue that it's better to not have a CEO than having one of those.
Note that Huang was the founder of Nvidia - he's not a naked ladder climber like Pichai or Krzanich at Intel previously. Huang made good moves with CUDA, being early on tensor cores by being forward looking.
That said, Nvidia is selling the shovels here, it's easy to look good.
Some companies have a real usecase for generative AI, but it's something like 5% of these stories. The rest is CEOs FOMOing
The goal of the CEO is to drive the stock price up in whatever horizon investors care about. Usually it's not a long horizon. It's not to build a sustainable product or even a product at all.
Many CEOs can't even do that properly. Check out Unity as a shiny example and they still get fat paycheck. In fact they gave themselves nice raises too if you check the SEC docs.
"Pivot to AI" is a strategy. A desperate one nonetheless.
From the article, this strategy is being announced to achieve a business goal:
> the newspaper will be looking for ways to use AI in its reporting as it seeks to recoup some of the $77 million it lost last year.
A company's vision/mission are higher-level determinations, almost like their "constitution"; everything below (goals, strategy, objectives, plans) should be defined in alignment with it.
It's just so cringe, No one has a clue what it means in real terms just put AI on "it" and hope for the best. i.e Hope we get some of that cash from somewhere.
I believe we will get a lot more "industrially manufactured" stories. Just pay for API access to reuters or another press agency and let the AI rewrite the content and push it on your news site ready to be consumed.
Content is wrongly summarized? I doubt in the news economy this hardly matters anymore.
“After six months of investigation and $15m in consulting fees, we have determined that our crossword designer can easily be replaced with advanced AI.”
[two days later]
“Okay, a songbird known for its imitation abilities, starts with ‘r’, ‘twe’ in the middle... wait what, Rottweiler?????”
It's late-stage tech bubble stuff; compare the period when people were trying to shoehorn Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain into everything. The goal shifts from "we should use Buzzword where it is useful" to "we should use Buzzword so that we are using Buzzword".
And anxious I suppose. Journalism should be synonymous with “people” and healthy society.
AI and journalism is going to yield one giant ball of misinformation.
I would love to say “we need more printed papers” like the good ‘ol days, but people don’t much have the patience to read by and large.
To be honest, at one time I was worried about the young generation and devices. But I’m starting to see older family members are getting plugged into the algorithm.
No, AI is one thing today and another thing tomorrow but the trend is unstoppable. Clearly we need to understand the boundaries where AI is just "hallucination" but it is right here right now and evolving. Zillions of startups are doing AI now, most will died but some will survive in this collective experiments.
Also, there was a time in HN when people argued before downvoting.
Or will it be like self-driving cars? Early gains, but then a long plateau?
AI is just not at the stage where outfits like the WP should be "pivoting" to it (whatever that means). I suspect it just means producing more "content" with fewer people, and the result will be garbage. Journalism doesn't need more content-filler type articles.
> No, AI is one thing today and another thing tomorrow but the trend is unstoppable. [..] Zillions of startups are doing AI now, most will died but some will survive in this collective experiments.
Substitute 'Blockchain' for 'AI' and this is a comment from 2016 or so. Not to say that one can predict the doom of 'AI' on that basis, but lots of VC money being ploughed into a thing does not necessarily mean that the thing will become a Thing.
I have companies in Blockchain, and in AI, and in Cybersecurity and can say that it is not the same. Blockchain never delivered for most people. For example, blockchain promised banks for the unbanked and the unbanked now use PSPs with mobile phone apps but not crypto. AI is delivering... I wonder why I need to explain this. In the dot com era there were a lot of hype about Internet... few consumers, then... kids don't know what Internet is while using mobile phone apps.
Delivering _what_, though? What concrete mass-market applications which either can pay for themselves or conceivably could pay for themselves are there, in production, today? Or are we still in 'jam tomorrow' mode?
Delivering what in what industries? I see SOME usefulness in SOME areas like, specifically, machine vision. But a lot of things? Medical? yeah, no. Lots of issues there. Text generation? Hallucinations out the ass and extremely iffy results often.
Most of the 'wins' in the text gen side still require a TON of work on the human's part to make it usable. People like to mention Pro's in Math and coding talking about it helping them with stuff but they are experts already.
It has potential in a lot of places but this rapid paced forcing of it everywhere is idiotic and foolhardy.
> AI is delivering... I wonder why I need to explain this.
...because clearly the community is unconvinced that AI is actually delivering, and the majority of examples seem to be barely-successful experiments promising improvement at some later point down the road?
Again, we've heard this entire shtick before. Miracle technology gets announced by some egghead teenager, and they write up a Whitepaper that is entirely ignored except for it's "Future Applications" section towards the end. Then the VCs and "thoughtful types" (I use that phrase lightly) harass them into making a business out of it. From then on the playbook is consistently the same; lie. Lie about how many people use your platform, lie about how easy it is to use, lie about how much better it is than the status-quo. They even deny the need to explain themselves when threatened, trying to insist their worth is self-evident and that we're the problem for not understanding their deflective mumbo-jumbo.
Vitalik Buterin, Craig Wright, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, they're all re-runs of the same hope-fueled moonshot that invariably ends in a violent fireball. Yes, you have to go the extra mile when convincing people that you have a logically-held position instead of a lie you are telling to inflate asset prices.
Block chain was easy to avoid. Yes the hysteria was the same, but the foundational and fundamental shifts in how the common person does something has changed for many. I've noticed with my own 'non techie' family members who have started using various integrations of LLM and less Google. An impact of something on society at large can usually be measured by how it is used by the youth of today. Chatgpt started by aiding kids in their assignments, but now many depend on it for answers to various non academic questions.
Whereas Block chain was not part of an average 5th grader's daily computer usage.
Just because we have made progress since the last one doesn't mean that _this_ time it will be magically different.
So what makes you think this will be any different?
Keep in mind that each hype cycle was started by a leap in progress, so you can't say this time it is different because we made a big leap in progress.
