[michaeldoron]

I appreciate my elders' experience, but do note that contemporary AI researchers and enthusiasts often feel similarly about AI advancements:

We watch AI models become better each month, not in ads, but in blogs and posts. While not making cover stories, new models do make the news. I was so excited when Dall-E first came out, I even hosted a guess-the-prompt party four years ago with what seems now like prehistoric-level generated images. The AI industry may face more scrutiny and criticism than the computer hardware industry of the olden days, but we even have a semblance of open source communities who are trying to democratize this for everyone.

All this to say, similar sentiments still exist in the frontier, it's just that the frontier moved.

[munificent]

In the 80s and 90s, most of the enthusiasm I saw was from nerds who just wanted to make cool stuff and share it with people. It felt like magic to make computers do things.

Much (but not all) of the enthusiasm I see with AI today seems to be from people who think it will make them rich, powerful, and freed from the apparently intolerable burden of having to interact with other humans in order to generate and consume media.

It's not the same.

[plorkyeran]

There are a lot of nerds out there who just want to do cool things with AI and share it with people. They're just incredibly outshouted by the people who want to get rich off AI. One of the big problems with the modern internet is that the person trying to make money off something is always going to put far more effort into self-promoting than the person doing something interesting.

I definitely enjoyed the phase of AI stuff where it wasn't actually useful yet more than the current one.

[fuzztester]

I agree with the earlier part of your comment, but am not clear about this part:

>and freed from the apparently intolerable burden of having to interact with other humans in order to generate and consume media.

Can you explain it?