[ravenstine]

A ton of HN'ers seem woefully butthurt over AI. I'm not saying that the current generation of AI is "smart" or "AGI", but every thread mentioning AI has a disproportionate amount of naysayers who think LLMs are either totally useless or that anything involving AI is "the next bitcoin."

When people knee-jerk react negatively to these kinds of stories, I can only picture envy and an insecurity of not truly knowing where AI will take the software field, despite the amount of certainty displayed by many.

[nicoburns]

I think the hype around AI is more like the dotcom boom. Like the internet (and mostly unlike cryptocurrency), AI is a genuinely useful technology and likely to be transformative over the long term. On the other hand, (and also like the internet) it's currently being peddled as the answer to absolutely everything, much of which is pretty ridiculous.

[prottog]

The number of ads on YouTube that peddle an "AI-powered X" is a clear tell. Just last night, I saw an ad for an "AI golf swing aid"!

[ravenstine]

Probably a shoddy product in reality, but that concept sounds awesome in principle.

Imagine an AI that's an LLM, TTS engine, computer vision, a specialized neural net, and various sensors tied together that can help teach you a motor skill any time and anywhere. Even better if it could somehow provide haptic feedback. I think there's something to this, but perhaps it will truly develop out of novel therapies rather than some dudebro startup.

[ravenstine]

That's a good point. And a bit of a chilling revelation given how the words "recession" and "this year" keep getting thrown around. Hopefully the gap between the boom of AI and the bubble popping is at least as long as the one between the boom of the Web and the Dotcom bubble.

[mercutio2]

I love this analogy.

Tiny nitpick: technology being pedaled makes me think of e-bikes. Which are awesome. But you probably meant peddled!

[granshaw]

The crowd here just wants to ensure their high paying mega tech jobs stay safe. Can’t blame them, kinda in the same camp

[ravenstine]

I can't blame them either, though I guess I skipped right ahead to the "acceptance" stage of grief.