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 genuinely find AI useful or believe that AI has great utility and potential?

Don't waste your time or energy on this article. I wish I hadn't. Go build something, or at least make thoughtful, well defined critiques of the world.

It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad.

AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage.

I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two years when a rudimentary version of it is finally realized.

What especially pisses me off is the know it all tone, like they knew all along it's garbage and that they're above it all. These people are tools with no opinions other then hype = bad and logic = nonexistent.

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?

Its a matter of opinion who cares what I think - if your list includes those things as fundamental changes that redefined society and technology then that's valid.

All I am saying is that LLMs are amongst the most revolutionary changes that break new ground and completely change the world - in my personal opinion.

If the personal computer counts, do mobile phones count?

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

I almost think there is an analogue of deep learning and mobile phones

Deep learning failed to solve self-driving. In 2012 people said self driving would probably be ubiquitous by 2018, and it definitely would be by 2020

Instead we got chat bots in 2022 - that turned out to be the killer app, certainly the most widely adopted one

Likewise, instead of mobile phones being used as an aid in the physical world, they became the world (e.g. the media they transmit seems to be how elections are won and lost now). It’s the device by which people form impressions of the world

>> do mobile phones count?

For sure yes, I missed that.

Missing from the list is the daily march of improved silicon performance through 50+ years.

* creation of computers

* 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.

Just because you don't like LLMs doesn't make them not revolutionary with regards to how people use computers.

I like LLMs, I am rooting for them.

They will be revolutionary and join the list once the technology stands the test of time.

There you go. A simple test that cannot be rushed by more datacenters.

They've been around for years now. Obviously not as long as the others, but years nonetheless. What makes you think the years so far may not continue into the future?

The only pattern I can see is it being potentially unsustainable, but I find it hard to believe that, considering I can run an LLM that is more capable that SOTA from 2 years ago on a single box in my living room.

There's three types of people w.r.t hype: smart people who resist hype, smart people who want to profit off of it, and dumb people who like it.

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.

Fourth type: smart people who like hype because hype is fun and having fun is good.

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.

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.

> 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).

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?”

This strikes me as curmudgeonly and unnecessarily contrarian.

While it's true that investors, entrepreneurs, corporations, etc. have a vested interest in AI to the tune of trillions of dollars, the impulse to dismiss this as 90% hype (as the author does) is insane.

We're only three years into this, and we have:

- LLMs with grad student-level competency in everything

- Multimodality with complex understanding of photography and technical documents

- Image generators that can generate high-quality photos, in any style, with just a text description

- Song generators that make pretty decent music and video generators that aren't half bad

- Excellent developer tooling & autocomplete; very competent code generation

This is still early and the foundations are still being laid. Imagine where we'll be in 10 years, assuming even a linear growth rate in capabilities.

Think of what the internet is today, and its permanence in everything, and where it was just 30 years ago.

By all means, resist the hype - but don't go so far in the other direction that your head is in the sand.

Why would we assume linear growth in capabilities and not a logarithmic growth rate? It seems time and time again, it gets harder and harder to make progress.

I think back to using Dragon Natural Dictation in 1998, there seemed to be exponential promise and a ton of excitement in my young mind. But the reality was more logarithmic improvements so it is finally pretty good 25 years later.

find the only 10% is real part interesting. I'm starting to note two distinct camps emerge I think? Transformer architectures are just search (/bad search) vs they are the first commercial grade compression of language into real vectors. The trap I think is it's somewhat subtle in how they discuss things?

Rather, let's look for things in tech that never hyped but are very useful.

If hype is bad, then there must be something good, and unhyped to such high proportions. Something unhypable.

Otherwise it's all crap, isn't it? It can't be like that.

How delightfully contrarian.

I hate obnoxious assholes who insist on taking a contrarian position on technology to such an extreme they become the same puritans they revolted against early in their career.

This forum is riddled with people like this.