[tablespoon]

> Personally I predict that generative AI is going to be the next Metaverse and crypto.

A common thread tying those three things together is that, in large part, they're all impressive technologies in search of problems to solve.

Technologies like that are pretty much always overhyped and oversold.

[dvt]

> in large part, they're all impressive technologies in search of problems to solve.

I'm no AI fanboy, but let's be fair: machine learning has been solving problems for decades now. From OCR, to translation, to facial recognition, etc. While GPT4 or DALL-e may be "toys," large models (be they language, vision, or otherwise) definitely have a future in business automation, data collation, military applications, etc.

[WorldMaker]

I feel like this is some of where my own cynicism comes from: the machine learning that has been solving problems for decades now were almost all predicted and prototyped in the 60/70s "AI boom". The generative models were all "toys" then, too and none of the 60/70s "predictions" of when/where/how they might become more than "toys" ever really came to pass and sounded so much like people on HN are saying today.

We're certainly doing more of (almost) everything explored/predicted by "the ancients", we're doing it all much, much faster with much more massive data sets of input and output. For me, though, there isn't a sense that we are doing anything substantially new beyond Moore's Law meets mega-scale GIGO. There's something of a pervasive feel to me to this hype cycle like we are just recreating past mistakes of boom and then (inevitable) bust and haven't learned enough from them.

But I've become too cynical, perhaps.

[tomtheelder]

There’s absolutely been value delivered, but at every turn it’s been vastly less than what was promised. I would be very surprised if generative AI doesn’t turn out to be the same: legitimately and seriously useful in certain use cases, but not as revolutionary as it’s being sold. I’m excited to see what comes of all this, but the hype is at an absolute fever pitch and I’m yet to see much past niche use cases and help along the periphery for more general tasks.

I mean even crypto has some actual, meaningful use cases, it’s just not replacing all currencies and fundamentally reshaping financial systems like a lot of folks thought it would.