What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes.
> It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that it resembles the fashion industry.
Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?
Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented".
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. ... 10% of the AI hype is based on useful facts
The author ascribes malice to people who disagree with them about the use of AI. The author says proponents of AI are "greedy", "careless", unskilled, inexperienced, and unproductive. How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential?
Don't waste your time on this article. I wish I hadn't. Go build something, or at least make thoughtful, well defined critiques of the world.
>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?
Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today?
This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025:
i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution
Do you remember someone from the databases industry claiming that databases are going to be "like the renaissance" or lik the industrial revolution? Oracle? Microsoft? PostgreSQL?
Here's another one with an excerpt of an interview with Demis Hssabis, dated April 17, 2025:
" I think maybe in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease."
Nobel Prize Winner and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on how AI can revolutionize drug discovery doing "science at digital speed."
Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"? Data centers? Computers in general? All disease?
- Company hires tens of people to build an undefined problem. They have a solution (and even that is rather nebulous) and are looking for a problem to solve.
- Company pushes the thing down your throat. The goal is not clear. They make authoritative-sounding statements on how it improves productivity, or throughput, or some other metric, only to retract later when you pull off those people into a private meeting.
- People who claim what all the things that nebulous solution can accomplish when, in fact, nobody really knows because the thing is in a research phase. These are likely the "charlatans" OP is referring to, and s/he's not wrong.
- Learning "next hot thing" instead of the principles that lead to it and, worse still, apply "next hot thing" in the wrong context when the trade-offs have reversed. My own example: writing a single-page web application with "next hot JS framework" when you haven't even understood the trade-off between client-side and server-side rendering (this is just my example, not OP's, but you can probably relate.)
etc. etc. Perhaps the post isn't very well articulated, but it does make several points. If you haven't experienced any of the above, then you're just not in the kind of company that OP probably has worked at. But the things they describe are very real.
I agree there is nothing wrong with "hype" per se, but the author is using the word in a very particular context.
There are issues with our current economic model and it blows down to rent. The service need model is allowing the owners and controllers of capital to set up systems that allow them to extract as much rent as possible, AI is just another approach to this.
And then if it is successful for building, as you say we'll have yet another production issue as that building is essentially completely automatic. Read how over production has affect society for pretty much ever and then ask yourself will it really be good for the masses.
Additionally all the media is so thoroughly captured that we're in "1984" yet so few people seem to realise it. The elites will start wars, crush people's livelihoods and brainwash everyone into being true believers as they march their sons to war while living in poverty.
What a shallow, negative post. Can't believe you're implying that there's no outsized hype about AI. At least bring some arguments forth instead of asking silly hypothetical questions.
> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?
Well, dear gosh. You look at the objective qualities of the technology then compare it to what's being said about it. For stuff like AI, blockchain etc. the hype surrounding them is orders of magnitude greater than their utility. Less so for AI than the near-useless blockchain, but still disproportionate.
AI has an obvious downside in its inability to ever be the source of truth. So then all you need to do is look for the companies using it as such, even for something as simple as phone support and you've got your hype-driven bone-headed decision making right there: [1] [2].
> Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented".
Very clever wording, you can make "one of the most beneficial tools ever invented" fit basically anything with a little bit of spin. Make up your mind instead of inventing weasel statements.
> How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential?
Oh I'm sure most of them do. Does not contradict "greedy, careless, unskilled" in any way.
It's sad to see such a terrible comment at the top of the discussion. You start with an ad-hominem against author assuming they want to "look smart" by writing negatively about hype, you construct a straw-man to try to make your point, and you barely touch on any of the points made by them, and when you do, you pick on the weakest one. Shame.
By telling others not to read something doesn't it just make them curious and want to read it even more. Do HN readers actually obey such commands issued by HN commenters.
To me, AI hype seems to be the most tangible/real hype in a decade.
Ever since mobile & cloud era at their peaks in 2012 or 2014, we’ve had Crypto, AR, VR, and now AI.
I have some pocket change bitcoin, ethereum, played around for 2 minutes on my dust-gathering Oculus & Vision Pro; but man, oh man! Am I hooked to ChatGpt or what!
It’s truly remarkably useful!
You just can’t get this type of thing in one click before.
For example, here’s my latest engineering productivity boosting query:
“when using a cfg file on the cmd line what does "@" as a prefix do?”
It's astonishing how the two camps of LLM believers vs LLM doubters has evolved even though we as people are largely very similar, doing similar work.
Why is it that e.g. you believe LLMs are truly revolutionary, whereas e.g. I think they are not? What are the things you are doing with LLMs day to day that are life changing, which I am not doing? I'm so curious.
When I think of things that would be revolutionary for my job, I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me - creating an application that is correct, maintainable, efficient, and scalable. That would solve 80% of my job. From my trials of LLMs, they are nowhere near that level, and barely pass the "correct" requirement.
Further, the cynic in me wonders what work we can possibly be doing where text generation is revolutionary. Keeping in mind that most of our jobs are ultimately largely pointless anyway, so that implies a limit on the true usefulness of any tool. Why does it matter if I can make a website in 1/10th the time if the website doesn't contribute meaningfully to society?
Your example is a better search engine. The AI hype however is the promise that it will be smarter (not just more knowledgeable) than humans and replace all jobs.
And it isn't on the way there. Just today, a leading state of the art model, that supposedly passed all the most difficult math entry exams and whatever they "benchmark", reasoned with the assumption of "60 days in January". It would simply assume that and draw conclusions, as if that were normal. It also wasn't able to corrrectly fill out all possible scores in a two player game with four moves and three rules, that I made up. It would get them wrong over and over.
I’ll do whatever shit the industry wants me to do, I don’t particularly care if it’s dumb. I mean, it doesn’t FEEL great to work on dumb things, but at the end of the day, I’m around to help implement whatever the paycheck writer wants to see. I genuinely don’t mean that negatively either, I feel like I’m just describing… employment?
Software just isn’t a core part of my identity. I like building it, I like most of the other people who write it, and I like most/some of the people paying me to build it. When I’m done for the day, I very much stop thinking about it (not counting shower thoughts and whatnot on deeper problems)
So what if I end up fixing slop code from AI hype in a couple years? I have been cleaning up slop code from other people for 15 years. I am painfully aware of slop I left for others to deal with too (sorry).
So yeah anyway, your comment resonated. Hype is annoying, but if it sticks around and becomes dominant, my point is, whatever, okay, new thing to learn.
A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
The amount of misuse this quote gets is as absurd as it is tiresome. People were using it to defend NFTs too. Someone’s opinion on one thing says nothing about someone else’s opinion about a different thing.
He’s 100 percent correct and if you disagree you underestimate the effects of the Fax Machine on the economy and over-estimate the effects of the internet of 2005.
Sure there's plenty of hype. But its justified to some extent at least. LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history. In computing the big ones are:
* creation of computers
* personal computers
* the Internet and world wide web
* LLMs
So the hype is at some level entirely warranted - its a revolutionary technology with real impact. As opposed to for example the hype around crypto or NFTs or blockchain or garbage like that.
Pretty arbitrary list, no? You could replace "LLMs" with various technologies that seem important (particularly at the beginning of their existence before their true value is determined). Why not: C, cloud computing, neural networks, Dijkstra's algorithm, WiFi, FFT, etc?
LLMs are at this point almost 8 years old (dating from the Attention is All You Need paper). If it's truly a revolutionary technology, you should be able to point me to a company leveraging LLMs to make absolute bank, leaving all of its non-LLM-based competitors in the dust.
But instead, what I see in this thread in defense of the revolutionary ideals of LLMs, is how good future LLMs are going to be. That's not a sign of a revolutionary technology, that's a sign of hype. If you want to convince me otherwise, point to how good they are right now.
If nobody was paying attention to what the foundational companies have been doing for the past few years, I'm pretty sure I'd be a wild advocate singing their praises on these and other forums.
But since everyone is extremely into it, I just kind of watch and try to measure my expectations.
> LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history.
See, that’s what the article is about.
Saying LLM is on the same level of steam power, the computer, the internet, airplanes, etc. when the technology hasn’t even been around enough to have real impact, and all I read is extrapolation about how everything will be based on it “in the future” — that’s the definition of hype.
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI.
Cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there. I fail to see how that's hype.
Server management, data center and related business existed ages ago. What's hype is this cloud? People are made to believe that cloud is not a server or servers.
It's an enhancement sure, but not something completely new or different.
> it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there
And most of them would be fine without it. Rent some racks. Run some servers. That's exactly why it's hype.
The hype is that “cloud” is and makes everything magically better / easier / more secure / more efficient etc. Many companies jumped head first into large-scale cloud migrations and buildouts without any thought about where and how “cloud” makes sense, what the risks / downsides / true costs are, etc. Just like they are doing now with AI.
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI.
I envy being able to write a statement like this without mentioning The Blockchain.
The Cloud has joined The Information Superhighway as boring, foundational technology. Blockchain started out as hype and is still hype. AI/LLMs already provide infinitely more value than blockchain (which, to be fair, remains close to zero).
I typically disagree with the practice of hating things just because they are trending, this is the stuff hipsters are made of.
But, there is a such thing as negative hype. A seller of AI models telling the world he's not hiring engineers anymore (and they too can cut their workforce) because his models are that good would be negative hype.
I worked for a very large industrial some years ago. Our leaders were so ate up with the VR hype that they greenlit a VR training experience for field technicians wherein the technician would wear a VR headset and then use a virtual iPad to diagnose some of our heavy equipment. Someone asked why they couldn’t just use an iPad IRL to learn. There was no rational justification.
Shortly after that web 3.0 took off and I started to hear that we were going to use blockchain to track the maintenance of our heavy equipment.
Remember all those articles about some minor advance in surface chemistry which was then hyped into Trillion Dollar Industry Real Soon Now? They usually appeared in one of Nature's off-brand journals, or just arxiv, not in Chemical Engineering News or IEEE Trans. on Power Engineering. Such articles usually lacked the usual performance numbers (Wh/L, Wh/Kg, and Wh/$).
Then there's Javascript framework hype, which makes everyone run very hard to stay in the same place.
AI is at least making rapid progress. It's been less than three years since ChatGPT came out. Having lived and worked through the "AI Winter" (1984-2005), this is an improvement. The main problem now remains "hallucinations", or worse, "agentic" systems which act on hallucinations.
I've learned to treat AI hype the same way I think about sports. Just ignore it. Sure I can name the popular models of the day in the same way I can name the Dallas Cowboys, but none of it matters and none of it affects me.
>Nobody wants to talk to an AI when they need support. We all HATE that! It is bad enough that when you need service and support you end up talking to someone on the other side of the planet who's using some kind of answer sheet with absolutely no clue on how to really help you.
This is true from my personal experience. Had switched my fiber provider because, with my previous provider, i was never able to talk to a human.
Kind of a bad article (IMO) when it sideswipes cloud computing.
The "cloud" was actually useful, and helped to scale so many companies that could bring their products to millions of people quickly and without too many issues, and with good reliability.
Blockchain, hyper enabled gambling, cryptocurrency, and jamming "AI" into everything are bad though.
“AI is misleading, there’s no actual intelligence.”
Oh wow, you figured out “Artificial Intelligence” isn’t literal. You should tell the rest of the planet. Maybe we should rename it “Statistical Pattern Prediction Machines That Are Better at Your Job Than You Are.” It’s a mouthful, but more honest.
You can measure hype by how many people are talking about an idea space. Write an article about "X hype is bad" and yup, you're talking about the idea space i.e. you're participating in the hype.
hype is short for hyperbole, and if there is any hyperbole more excessive than claiming that LLMs are vaguely equivalent to people by calling them "AI", it would have to be a claim of godhood or similar.
There are a lot of IQ points in this comment section being dedicated to debating the semantics of the word “hype” rather than engaging with the substance of what the article discusses.
As a Linux user, I do think there's a bit of an echo chamber which leads to groupthink such as this article. And it's ironic because a lot of the underpinnings of AI use Linux as their underpinning.
I tend to agree with the author, but I think the real problem with hype is the opportunity cost. Somewhere along the way we bought into this idea that "the promise of X" is worth more than "the reality of X".
The longer the hype goes on - which is to say the longer it takes to demonstrate the hype is actually reality - the more people become more heavily invested in it.
If the hype never materialises, you basically build a larger and larger black swan when the crash arrives. The people who win are the few who got out early enough, and everyone else who ignored the hype.
If the hype does eventuate, the number of people you're now competing with in a new market is proportional to the length of time it took to eventuate, because for all those people that were onboard, some of them would enter the space in competition, not just as consumers. Again, the only outsized winners are those who got out early enough. The rest are now just working BAU. Like everyone else who ignored the hype.
In both cases, you're just as good or better off ignoring the hype because the chances of you winning big are tiny (unless you're a billionaire, but in that case you were already winning anyway).
[+] [-] sqs|10 months ago|reply
> It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that it resembles the fashion industry.
Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?
Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented".
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. ... 10% of the AI hype is based on useful facts
The author ascribes malice to people who disagree with them about the use of AI. The author says proponents of AI are "greedy", "careless", unskilled, inexperienced, and unproductive. How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential?
Don't waste your time on this article. I wish I hadn't. Go build something, or at least make thoughtful, well defined critiques of the world.
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|10 months ago|reply
Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today?
This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025:
https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518
Whence I quote:
Do you remember someone from the databases industry claiming that databases are going to be "like the renaissance" or lik the industrial revolution? Oracle? Microsoft? PostgreSQL?Here's another one with an excerpt of an interview with Demis Hssabis, dated April 17, 2025:
https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/1912929020905206233
Whence I quote:
Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"? Data centers? Computers in general? All disease?[+] [-] grg0|10 months ago|reply
- Company hires tens of people to build an undefined problem. They have a solution (and even that is rather nebulous) and are looking for a problem to solve.
- Company pushes the thing down your throat. The goal is not clear. They make authoritative-sounding statements on how it improves productivity, or throughput, or some other metric, only to retract later when you pull off those people into a private meeting.
- People who claim what all the things that nebulous solution can accomplish when, in fact, nobody really knows because the thing is in a research phase. These are likely the "charlatans" OP is referring to, and s/he's not wrong.
- Learning "next hot thing" instead of the principles that lead to it and, worse still, apply "next hot thing" in the wrong context when the trade-offs have reversed. My own example: writing a single-page web application with "next hot JS framework" when you haven't even understood the trade-off between client-side and server-side rendering (this is just my example, not OP's, but you can probably relate.)
etc. etc. Perhaps the post isn't very well articulated, but it does make several points. If you haven't experienced any of the above, then you're just not in the kind of company that OP probably has worked at. But the things they describe are very real.
I agree there is nothing wrong with "hype" per se, but the author is using the word in a very particular context.
[+] [-] Guthur|10 months ago|reply
And then if it is successful for building, as you say we'll have yet another production issue as that building is essentially completely automatic. Read how over production has affect society for pretty much ever and then ask yourself will it really be good for the masses.
Additionally all the media is so thoroughly captured that we're in "1984" yet so few people seem to realise it. The elites will start wars, crush people's livelihoods and brainwash everyone into being true believers as they march their sons to war while living in poverty.
[+] [-] Mawr|10 months ago|reply
> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?
Well, dear gosh. You look at the objective qualities of the technology then compare it to what's being said about it. For stuff like AI, blockchain etc. the hype surrounding them is orders of magnitude greater than their utility. Less so for AI than the near-useless blockchain, but still disproportionate.
AI has an obvious downside in its inability to ever be the source of truth. So then all you need to do is look for the companies using it as such, even for something as simple as phone support and you've got your hype-driven bone-headed decision making right there: [1] [2].
> Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented".
Very clever wording, you can make "one of the most beneficial tools ever invented" fit basically anything with a little bit of spin. Make up your mind instead of inventing weasel statements.
> How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential?
Oh I'm sure most of them do. Does not contradict "greedy, careless, unskilled" in any way.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536860
[+] [-] mariusor|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|10 months ago|reply
By telling others not to read something doesn't it just make them curious and want to read it even more. Do HN readers actually obey such commands issued by HN commenters.
[+] [-] bestvibecoder|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tsecurity|10 months ago|reply
It could lead to good things. Most startups have hype.
[+] [-] cafed00d|10 months ago|reply
Ever since mobile & cloud era at their peaks in 2012 or 2014, we’ve had Crypto, AR, VR, and now AI.
I have some pocket change bitcoin, ethereum, played around for 2 minutes on my dust-gathering Oculus & Vision Pro; but man, oh man! Am I hooked to ChatGpt or what!
It’s truly remarkably useful!
You just can’t get this type of thing in one click before.
For example, here’s my latest engineering productivity boosting query: “when using a cfg file on the cmd line what does "@" as a prefix do?”
[+] [-] mcdeltat|10 months ago|reply
Why is it that e.g. you believe LLMs are truly revolutionary, whereas e.g. I think they are not? What are the things you are doing with LLMs day to day that are life changing, which I am not doing? I'm so curious.
When I think of things that would be revolutionary for my job, I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me - creating an application that is correct, maintainable, efficient, and scalable. That would solve 80% of my job. From my trials of LLMs, they are nowhere near that level, and barely pass the "correct" requirement.
Further, the cynic in me wonders what work we can possibly be doing where text generation is revolutionary. Keeping in mind that most of our jobs are ultimately largely pointless anyway, so that implies a limit on the true usefulness of any tool. Why does it matter if I can make a website in 1/10th the time if the website doesn't contribute meaningfully to society?
[+] [-] lgrapenthin|10 months ago|reply
And it isn't on the way there. Just today, a leading state of the art model, that supposedly passed all the most difficult math entry exams and whatever they "benchmark", reasoned with the assumption of "60 days in January". It would simply assume that and draw conclusions, as if that were normal. It also wasn't able to corrrectly fill out all possible scores in a two player game with four moves and three rules, that I made up. It would get them wrong over and over.
[+] [-] asdfman123|10 months ago|reply
The first type of person already agrees with you. The second type knows but doesn't care. The third isn't going to read this article.
[+] [-] jackphilson|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] shikon7|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] corytheboyd|10 months ago|reply
Software just isn’t a core part of my identity. I like building it, I like most of the other people who write it, and I like most/some of the people paying me to build it. When I’m done for the day, I very much stop thinking about it (not counting shower thoughts and whatnot on deeper problems)
So what if I end up fixing slop code from AI hype in a couple years? I have been cleaning up slop code from other people for 15 years. I am painfully aware of slop I left for others to deal with too (sorry).
So yeah anyway, your comment resonated. Hype is annoying, but if it sticks around and becomes dominant, my point is, whatever, okay, new thing to learn.
[+] [-] wewewedxfgdf|10 months ago|reply
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul...
[+] [-] latexr|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Maxamillion96|10 months ago|reply
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug...
[+] [-] parineum|10 months ago|reply
That's not insignificant. They're stupid now because we have the Internet but they were a major leap in conducting business.
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|10 months ago|reply
Now to be fair. He wasn't wrong in all his claims.
[+] [-] brikym|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wewewedxfgdf|10 months ago|reply
* creation of computers
* personal computers
* the Internet and world wide web
* LLMs
So the hype is at some level entirely warranted - its a revolutionary technology with real impact. As opposed to for example the hype around crypto or NFTs or blockchain or garbage like that.
[+] [-] chubot|10 months ago|reply
I would certainly think so, except all those high quality sensors have been hindered by app stores and subpar apps, imo :-(
I would like to hear some uplifting stories about creative things people do with their phones, rather than consume media
[+] [-] mcdeltat|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jcranmer|10 months ago|reply
But instead, what I see in this thread in defense of the revolutionary ideals of LLMs, is how good future LLMs are going to be. That's not a sign of a revolutionary technology, that's a sign of hype. If you want to convince me otherwise, point to how good they are right now.
[+] [-] alganet|10 months ago|reply
* personal computers
* the Internet and world wide web
Full stop.
There, I fixed the list in a way that will stand the test of time.
[+] [-] kylecazar|10 months ago|reply
If nobody was paying attention to what the foundational companies have been doing for the past few years, I'm pretty sure I'd be a wild advocate singing their praises on these and other forums.
But since everyone is extremely into it, I just kind of watch and try to measure my expectations.
[+] [-] manoDev|10 months ago|reply
See, that’s what the article is about.
Saying LLM is on the same level of steam power, the computer, the internet, airplanes, etc. when the technology hasn’t even been around enough to have real impact, and all I read is extrapolation about how everything will be based on it “in the future” — that’s the definition of hype.
[+] [-] pyfon|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zusammen|10 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] angarg12|10 months ago|reply
Cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there. I fail to see how that's hype.
[+] [-] re-thc|10 months ago|reply
Server management, data center and related business existed ages ago. What's hype is this cloud? People are made to believe that cloud is not a server or servers.
It's an enhancement sure, but not something completely new or different.
> it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there
And most of them would be fine without it. Rent some racks. Run some servers. That's exactly why it's hype.
[+] [-] bmink|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|10 months ago|reply
I envy being able to write a statement like this without mentioning The Blockchain.
[+] [-] romanhn|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kylecazar|10 months ago|reply
But, there is a such thing as negative hype. A seller of AI models telling the world he's not hiring engineers anymore (and they too can cut their workforce) because his models are that good would be negative hype.
[+] [-] mberning|10 months ago|reply
Shortly after that web 3.0 took off and I started to hear that we were going to use blockchain to track the maintenance of our heavy equipment.
Now they won’t shut up about AI.
[+] [-] Animats|10 months ago|reply
Remember all those articles about some minor advance in surface chemistry which was then hyped into Trillion Dollar Industry Real Soon Now? They usually appeared in one of Nature's off-brand journals, or just arxiv, not in Chemical Engineering News or IEEE Trans. on Power Engineering. Such articles usually lacked the usual performance numbers (Wh/L, Wh/Kg, and Wh/$).
Then there's Javascript framework hype, which makes everyone run very hard to stay in the same place.
AI is at least making rapid progress. It's been less than three years since ChatGPT came out. Having lived and worked through the "AI Winter" (1984-2005), this is an improvement. The main problem now remains "hallucinations", or worse, "agentic" systems which act on hallucinations.
[+] [-] sethops1|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sreekanth850|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinherron|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] babyent|10 months ago|reply
The "cloud" was actually useful, and helped to scale so many companies that could bring their products to millions of people quickly and without too many issues, and with good reliability.
Blockchain, hyper enabled gambling, cryptocurrency, and jamming "AI" into everything are bad though.
[+] [-] serverlessmania|10 months ago|reply
Oh wow, you figured out “Artificial Intelligence” isn’t literal. You should tell the rest of the planet. Maybe we should rename it “Statistical Pattern Prediction Machines That Are Better at Your Job Than You Are.” It’s a mouthful, but more honest.
[+] [-] sandspar|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dsr_|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nativeit|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mac-attack|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DavidPiper|10 months ago|reply
The longer the hype goes on - which is to say the longer it takes to demonstrate the hype is actually reality - the more people become more heavily invested in it.
If the hype never materialises, you basically build a larger and larger black swan when the crash arrives. The people who win are the few who got out early enough, and everyone else who ignored the hype.
If the hype does eventuate, the number of people you're now competing with in a new market is proportional to the length of time it took to eventuate, because for all those people that were onboard, some of them would enter the space in competition, not just as consumers. Again, the only outsized winners are those who got out early enough. The rest are now just working BAU. Like everyone else who ignored the hype.
In both cases, you're just as good or better off ignoring the hype because the chances of you winning big are tiny (unless you're a billionaire, but in that case you were already winning anyway).