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.
Also, there was a time in HN when people argued before downvoting.