[thewebguyd]

This idea is everywhere right now, that AI is some magic black box that will solve all your business problems. The sentiment is spreading through the exec team where I work now too. It's like a disease.

C-suites completely disconnected from reality and assuming we've already achieved ASI/AGI, and marketing teams & business journals are only furthering that narrative.

It's so weird. I don't know what it is about AI that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind. Its like they've been chomping at the bit for decades to get rid of those pesky humans and are so hyped up over it they can't see clearly anymore.

[ryandrake]

"Line must go up, forever."

These guys have squeezed out every cost and slack from their system. They've found the exact revenue-maximizing prices and segmentation for their products. They've cut quality to the point where customers will just barely not reject their product. They have used every legal and accounting trick at their disposal to keep that line going up. But, next quarter, line must still go up!

The final massive cost to cut are all those damn human bodies that they they still have to keep around. They've driven down salaries and benefits to the minimum they can get away with, and they've extracted the maximum value from employees they can. But they haven't figured out how to get rid of them entirely. They are staring down the barrel of the gun and just can't see a way to cut this cost further. Now, magic AI comes along, and everyone is saying that the black box can replace those bodies. The C-suites believe it. They have to believe it. Line must go up! This is how they'll do it for a few more quarters. This is why the messaging is so unified across the industry, across every C-suite out there. They all need to believe.

[mschuster91]

> Line must go up! This is how they'll do it for a few more quarters. This is why the messaging is so unified across the industry, across every C-suite out there. They all need to believe.

The real danger for the economy is when the runway finally runs out. And I believe we are at a perfect-storm scenario... AI is obviously a giant wash-trading bubble that alone would be sufficient to trigger a repeat of the 2007ff crisis. But on top of that, we got the issue you mentioned, i.e. everyone running out of kool-aid and noticing it too late, with no easy way of turning around, and we got the war risk and supply chain shocks thanks to Iran and Russia, and and and.

[thewebguyd]

And that's how you get a new war. Line must go up isn't only for the corps, its for US GOV debt too. Interest payments are already close to $1 trillion. As soon as GDP growth doesn't stay ahead of the compounding interest, the music stops. The line must go up or you get a sovereign deb crisis. When all other avenues are expended, the gov must force the economy to expand by any means necessary. Historically, that meant war.

[mschuster91]

Government debt can go down too. Democrat governments have been historically pretty good at balancing the budgets - only for their Republican successors to waste all of the effort on tax cuts for the rich and, yes, yet another dipshit war.

[brynnbee]

Your way of writing is nice.

[disgruntledphd2]

> It's so weird. I don't know what it is about AI that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind. Its like they've been chomping at the bit for decades to get rid of those pesky humans and are so hyped up over it they can't see clearly anymore.

It's just a hype cycle. In my 15 years in data, I've seen around 3-4. Every time leadership get way too invested in the possibilities, and they waste tons of money on doomed efforts. A good example of the prior one was "Big Data" which was even more pointless than the current AI boom.

Don't get me wrong, there is valuable tech there (at the very least, being able to reliably generate structured data from unstructured input is incredibly valuable in data), but the current hype is way off the charts.

[ClarityJones]

AI is particularly infectious among C suites, because AI is great at spewing words. A substantial portion of folks in those positions are there because of family connections, existing wealth, etc., and their only contribution to the business is similarly spewing words. They went to good colleges where they excelled at spewing words. They worked cushy / hard jobs where they had to spew the just the right normal predictable words for this context, perhaps at a large volume and with little notice... and the words were hard words... not known to those outside the industry.

For those that lack initiative, strategy, a real understanding of their business, engineering, etc., the spewing words is the whole thing. It overshadows their entire understanding.

[simianwords]

I think you are misleading people by calling it a "hype cycle". There is no going back from this technology. It is going to encroach every part of lives more and more.

What does hype even mean concretely? I think this is just a coping mechanism if you ask me.

[alwa]

“Hype Cycle” is a Gartner term of art, which they use to describe the way waves of technological innovation penetrate the business world:

https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...

The idea is there’s a rush of irrational exuberance when an “innovation trigger” makes a new toy looks promising, and everybody rushes to use it for everything, regardless of whether its suitability-for-purpose is proven. Inevitably many of those pioneers find that it’s not good for their particular problems after all; usage reaches a “peak of inflated expectations,” and crashes into a “trough of disillusionment.”

Then the tech enters a quieter and more gradual “slope of enlightenment” as people work out use cases where the tech actually adds value; then adoption reaches a “plateau of productivity.”

Worth a glance at the way they map this to prior waves of technological exuberance.

[simianwords]

Motte and Bailey.

From your video, it looks like your definition of hype involves a situation where eventual adoption increases above what is in the hype today.

Here's what the parent comment thinks:

> It's just a hype cycle. In my 15 years in data, I've seen around 3-4. Every time leadership get way too invested in the possibilities, and they waste tons of money on doomed efforts. A good example of the prior one was "Big Data" which was even more pointless than the current AI boom.

Obviously the parent doesn't think of hype the way you think of it because they claim that big data was pointless -- they don't see the eventual "slope of enlightenment". They think of hype cycle in the colloquial way and I was responding to that.

I see this all the time in the website and frankly the patronising "but actually hype means something else" is pointless and pedantic. I urge you to respond to words within the context and not bringing in academic definitions.

[disgruntledphd2]

I'll thank you to not put words in my mouth ;).

I think the tech is useful, but the hype is ridiculous so I expect lots of companies to have large share price declines et al when this settles.

Big data also had a good core, but all the e-commerce sites building a data lake wasted lots of money.

[simianwords]

The person I replied to put words in your mouth. You and I agree what you meant. You mean that the hype would die down and won’t come back up again. Ever. So reply to the person above who thinks you mean hype this way.

[dgellow]

Hype cycle doesn’t imply the technology has no value. But we should be able to talk about it as the boring, nerdy technology it is without that whole doom trolling and “AI will literally solve everything”

[red75prime]

> the boring, nerdy technology it is

Er, what? Intricacies of a transformer pipeline might be boring and nerdy, but the results are not. BTW, I've yet to find any strong argument on why the current ML approaches are bounded below the level you find appropriate to be bored.

[MattGrommes]

> It's so weird. I don't know what it is about AI that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind.

My favorite theory about this is that we're all used to "speech == intelligence" and now that we have something that can produce coherent speech, it seems like it must be intelligent to people who don't know how it works. Even people who know how it works still anthropomorphize it to a weird degree. So a business person sees this thing that's both intelligent (to them) and superhumanly fast and it seems like the ultimate silver bullet.

[greenavocado]

> I don't know what it is about AI that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind.

1. Zero personal risk because cargo culting is a valid excuse in Executive World. If investors are on board, its good, no matter how stupid or destructive it actually is.

2. Top leadership's friendship with the country's leadership equals access to cheap debt financing since money is all fake and generated out of thin air

3. Too big to fail

[vrganj]

Its ideology.

> Its like they've been chomping at the bit for decades to get rid of those pesky humans and are so hyped up over it they can't see clearly anymore.

This is precisely it. Here's my analysis:

AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave.

That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with it.

Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Even if their cyberjesus comes down to them through the machine and replaces all workers, who's gonna buy all their stuff then?

All they're doing in their capitalist zealotry is ringing in the end of capitalism.

[andrekandre]

  > A tech version of the Second Coming

is this why some people say if your anti-ai your basically the anti-christ? i've never understood the connection to that.

[zmgsabst]

They also don’t seem to realize the AI might take over highly paid executive positions before skilled work.

Knowledge or skilled workers can be used by the AI for swarm training data generation; what value do the execs have to AI?

I think the most beautiful part of capitalism is selling elites rope to hang themselves.

[hackingonempty]

If you are incapable of doing more than "spring init my_app" then the current models are like magic.