[dtj1123]

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progress.

It's like some 90s kid with a Nintendo power glove who's convinced themselves that this makes them a hacker. This is not the singularity.

I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be.

[AussieWog93]

I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out?

Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers.

You can literally just open Claude Code, say:

- "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute"

- "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android, and then test it on an emulator and sign it with my real key for distribution via Google Play"

- "get my GitHub Actions runner on Linux, Windows, macOS and Android, ensuring that it supports all available architectures from the last decade and a half, then check your outputs in a loop until it works"

and it just spits it out while you do the dishes.

Someone the other day talked about "AI psychosis psychosis" and it absolutely stuck with me. The people who deny this is a big deal are in la-la land.

We could literally hit a brick wall in terms of model intelligence now and it would still be a game changer.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute"

I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirements. Even Claude is nothing but a semi-competent tutorial clicker.

To someone who never did anything like this themselves the result might seem fantastic. They might not battle Claude on details like I did because "hey, it works, doesn't it".

Don't get me wrong, I agree in general that LLMs are a significant milestone. But I would like to add, especially because of your tone, that perception of how much of a leap it is, is very likely a matter of individual competence. So your enthusiasm might say more about yourself than about the tool.

[rsync]

"To someone who never did anything like this themselves the result might seem fantastic ..."

I've been "doing this" for over 30 years now and I consider these LLM results to be fantastic.

If one has a deep, conceptual understanding of tools, systems and protocols and if one has the ability to carefully provide careful, concise specifications, these LLM tools are like being granted superpowers.

In fact ...

My next project upon which to bring LLM tools to bear is a fully local, solar-powered, self-hosted LLM toolchain.

Not only do I intend to never work without these tools again, I intend to do so without the ongoing environmental externalities that they produce.

[oblio]

> If one has a deep, conceptual understanding of tools, systems and protocols and if one has the ability to carefully provide careful, concise specifications

Most people already don't have the ability to do this and their use of LLMs atrophies the little they had. "AI natives" will be completely doomed.

[jazzyjackson]

Umm, hate to break it to you, but by the time you load up an open weights model, the environmental externality has already happened

[rsync]

This is a fair point - and well taken.

However, I never asked for LLMs nor did my consumer nor professional behavior send market signals that I would use them. They were thrust upon me apropos of nothing.

Now that I find them useful, the least I can do is stop making the problem worse.

[jazzyjackson]

As a rule of thumb the energy use to produce a silicon wafer is roughly equal to the energy it will use in its lifetime. For GPU and VRAM this is considerable. To equip yourself with the capability to run an LLM locally is making an upfront investment in the production of extremely toxic and resource intensive products.

Why buy a personal EV with 600 mile range that sits idle 95% of the time when you can take a bus (aka the cloud) that maximizes the resource utilization?

[goatlover]

But you do plan on continuing to work, not have the AI bootstrap itself into a machine god and do all possible work for humanity instead.

[dehsge]

It’s not going to go back to pre LLM times, it’s also not going to go to a generative ai utopia where we can turn off our brains and a model will understand every nuance of human existence without some from of defined guidance.

Just like block chain still exists, it just didn’t revolutionize decentralization. It created a new tool that can be implemented when you want the benefits of what the blockchain can do, same thing will happen with language models.

[preg_match]

I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains. I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable.

And it's just... not. People want to be challenged, they want to read human material, they want to listen to human music. Sure those like crappy Spotify fake artists might make some coin for Spotify. But are people going out to those non-existent tours, or are they instead listening to Confessions II and praying nightly that Madonna tours again?

And, Madonna, if you're reading this: please go on tour. Please.

[phatskat]

Right? It feels akin to people who oppose social welfare and things like UBI because “people just don’t want to work.” The reality seems more like “people want to work, they mostly want to have a say in what that work is.” How many people working service jobs didn’t have access to higher ed, or couldn’t afford a guitar, or accidentally wound up taking care of a family before they could research algae, etc etc.

Personally, I’d be knitting and crocheting things for other people with most of my day if I didn’t have to worry about money, or I’d help my neighbor with the website she wants for her business venture, or I’d teach kids how to code. These are things I’d like to do, that I can’t readily do while having the overhead of a full time job unless I run myself ragged and tbh, I’d rather not.

[neetle]

I think the sentiment comes from people that just don’t find pleasure from working/mastery. The incentives have changed so much with llm-enabled development, but not which ones people respond to.

I miss the code mines

[phatskat]

I’m still in the mines but I don’t know for how long. Part of my performance evaluation for the year will include a section on using AI, so I’ll be biting the bullet and using copilot for glorified autocomplete like I did when it was still in beta.

I’m also perusing for shops that aren’t necessarily “anti-ai”, but where lack of using it isn’t seen as a negative

[Thanemate]

>I think the biggest realization to me of this whole thing is that most people don't want to turn off their brains.

I think there's a sample bias that affects this perception.

[sph]

People say they want to get challenged.

> most people don't want to turn off their brains

Biologically, life is an effort-minimizing machine. Our brains have a whole system of habit-forming to minimize the enormous amount of energy it takes to think.

Whatever people say, give them a way to think less, and they will necessarily prefer it unless they literally are a Buddhist monk, seeking to be aware over every action and thought.

[Starman_Jones]

Our brains also have evolved rewards for performing life-continuing behaviors, and then evolved to rewarding proxy behaviors, instead of the actual life-continuing behavior. This is perfectly in line with what you are saying, but now we are rewarded for spotting enemy snipers in CODBLOPS, rather than spotting lions/snakes/crocodiles.

We have gotten very good at hacking this reward function. It has reached a point where a thinking-minimization engine will pay a significant amount of resources to, say, Paradox Studios to do what is effectively the opposite of not thinking.

[preg_match]

They want to be challenged in such a way that they perceive to be enriching to their life. The reason people use AI at work and don't blink, but then won't listen to AI artists on Spotify, is that they see one as enriching, and the other as menial.

Optimizing the menial is the end-goal, optimizing fun and humanity and expression is not desirable. It's just not, and we're seeing that over and over again.

[fabianholzer]

> I think we, very naively, thought that some hypothetical life of zero-thought pure-leisure was not only achievable, but desirable.

May I recommend Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" to you?

[dtj1123]

May I recommend "Look to Windward" to you?

[maxerickson]

How did you get that impression?

[blizarre]

Yeah and no... I have been a developer for 20 years and most of my time isn't spent writing code. Most of my time is spent monitoring production, being in meetings, doing design work, doing code/spec reviews, creating tickets for infra/IT to deploy stuff...

So yeah I love AI and it really helps my personal projects. But my actual work? A little, I can work on some nice-to-have PR in the background during my meetings. I might be 20% more effective coding? Mostly because I do more of these low-hanging fruit PR like bug fixes and refactoring. The hard stuff still require thinking. But that's not even half of my time. It's fun, but not world-changing.

[toasty228]

> I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world.

That's not the problem, the problem is that for every hour of dev saved society will lose 10 hours on fake data, fake bug reports, automated scams, needlessly convoluted email, etc.

[59percentmore]

Because having a slave do whatever you say can also enable some pretty remarkable workflows, but that doesn't stop it from being too morally and economically expensive to become ubiquitous AND sustainable. LLM usage certainly doesn't involve sapient beings and so doesn't carry the same moral reprehensibility as slavery, but in real terms, it's probably even more of a financial quandary.

[treis]

Nothing contradicts AI psychosis psychosis by comparing a computer program to slavery

[goatlover]

Yes it's a useful tool. What does that have to do with the singularity, recursive ASI, fully automated economies or whatever is being hyped as the radical transformation of society?

[oblio]

1. Everything you said is more about revolutionizing IT though. IT is more easily testable than other things in real life.

2. The gap between the singularity and really strong automation is huge. It's basically that between 1 million and infinity, or even better, that joke about the difference between 1 million and 1 billion being roughly 1 billion.

[saghm]

#1 is what's so crazy to me that people have trouble understanding. No one is saying that we're going back to the pre-LLM world; it's just that the world isn't honestly that different than before. Most people's lives are pretty much the same. Their power bills are higher, but that's not all that different from when gas starts costing more because of a new oil war. The government has some new ways to spy and target weapons, but that's pretty abstract to most people (and it's not like they were having trouble doing those things before). Some new tech companies pop up and have a bunch of money, and some existing ones have less, but nobody outside of the tech industry who isn't already a huge outlier in terms of how much they pay attention to stock prices really cares.

If this is the singularity, consider me extremely underwhelmed. My job my have changed, but to the rest of the world, it's just more of the same.

[skydhash]

The issue is not capabilities (and never was). The issue is reliability.

And that’s assuming you really need to do these type of tasks using an LLM. As GP said, and as you’ve proven, most people are trying to use LLM as an hammer for everything that looks like a nail, without verifying first if it’s a screw or something else.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out?

Every time there's a new model This Changes Everything. Every single time.

Every time someone points out a limitation of LLMs it's always the same refrain: "Have you tried the latest? Because they're so much better now!". Except this happens with every single model generation. Every time the new models are so good that it's a seismic shift, a step change, a paradigm shift. It's like the finest curve asymptoting ever upwards, a few billions of training cost at a time.

But- to where? AI keeps getting so groundbreakingly better and we're still stuck in the same old world, except now you can...

... port your unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android? Why was your app unmaintained? What is the societal and technological upheaval that will come from automating such low-stakes tasks? For such huge costs?

[Schlagbohrer]

But it is now possible for a very non technical user to vibe code Grand Theft Auto II for fun. In two years they'll be able to vibe code GTA V for fun.

Likewise with many other things - people who don't know how to code can produce large custom programs which do what they needed. They're probably not amazingly well written nor maintainable by a human with limited time on their hands but that also doesn't matter at all for nearly all use cases.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

That should completely destroy the software industry and the software development profession, but this hasn't happened yet far as I can tell. Maybe we're not quite there yet?

I've only found this guy trying to code GTA 6 before it's released (not II):

https://mashable.com/tech/ai-startup-founder-attempts-to-vib...

Is that the one you meant? I wonder why he didn't try to code GTA 7. I mean, why not?

[UncleMeat]

LLMs are very good at programming. This is clear. Software engineering will look very different in 2030 than it did in 2020. There are also opportunities now for people to use code to solve problems that weren't previously economical because hiring a programmer was expensive.

Will AI function the same way in all domains? That is the current narrative.

[zombot]

> and sign it with my real key

That's the kind of irresponsible foolishness that makes it hard for me to take you seriously.

[neonstatic]

> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society.

I don't want to sound like a jerk, so please let me know if I do - I don't understand why you claim that "most of us" felt that way. I ignored "AI" until mid 2024. Then I tried it and was very unimpressed. I tried again in 2026. Seemed useful, then very quickly I realized that it's something that looks great until you look closer.

I was never impressed by a text generator. A talking computer might be the most boring thing I could imagine. I never understood why people got so obsessed by it and I certainly don't understand why it would "change society". Society is composed of people. What would change society is something that would allow people to think less, feel more clearly, express themselves more freely, and suffer less. Of course, things that accomplish these results exist, but they require a lot of effort. I cannot fathom how a technology that doesn't lead to these results could revolutionize anything. In fact, every technology, that I witnessed arising since late 90s has made things worse precisely because it has not done anything to address the human condition, instead praying on it.

[ChiMan]

No revolution revolutionizes in the way planned or hyped. Instead, once triggered, it emerges mostly unplanned. It unfolds as the product of human action but not of human design.

Individuals will use LLMs as they see fit in their work. They'll make a lot of mistakes because they don't see their own work clearly and because they don't really understand the outcomes others care about. Executives who make their money with their mouths will, of course, endlessly open their mouths, even as they don't understand the tech because they never really use any tech beyond email, text, and phones. And so on.

Nobody knows how LLMs will ultimately shake out. But even five minutes of using Claude makes it hard to imagine all white-collar work will continue as in the past.

[Aerroon]

Even as a teenager the singularity didn't make sense to me. Why would AI capabilities suddenly improve by an astronomical amount? It's still going to be running on hardware and software that we (humans) design. Even if AI reached parity with human brains it would still need to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude to reach parity with human society's output. And only then could it start to outpace the improvements that humans are making.

Even if the AI singularity is possible, the acceleration would take a long time. Possibly a lifetime.

[Izkata]

The singularity is the tipping point where the AI can improve itself faster than humans can comprehend, so the software at least wouldn't be human-designed anymore.

It requires a level of self-driven intent and access to their own code LLMs aren't capable of on their own. They might be one component of such a future system though, we just don't know yet. Even then it would probably take quite a while to reach that tipping point. GP is just wrong, talking as if we'd already reached it.

[danny_codes]

We won't know how close we are to takeoff until takeoff. My main critique of AI is that takeoff is dangerous, and we're basically running towards the cliff as fast as we can. Will you grow wings before you fall to your death? That's basically the bet we're making, if you believe in takeoff.

Silver lining is that if it goes bad we probably won't live long (as a species) to say "I told you so"

[mike_hearn]

Probably not though. AI is already designing its own chips, optimizing its own GPU kernels, suggesting the next experiments to run and writing its own harnesses... recursive self improvement is here already. It's just a question of speed, time and how far it goes.

[jeffybefffy519]

The thing i never got about the singularity is that its just one concept that was suggested by a few notable people over time. There is so many different ways AI can go, some which we wouldn't have foreseen.

[drob518]

> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society.

Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil salesmen are claiming. This is very similar to the internet. The best bubbles are built on a kernel of truth that is then blown way out of proportion and wrapped in layers of snake oil fabrication.

> I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be.

So, you’re committed to falling for the next one, too, eh?

[TheOtherHobbes]

Manias go back a long way.

The history of the UK's railway mania in the 1840s is worth researching, because it's uncannily similar, with a stock bubble, fraudsters and chancers, huge hype, cutthroat competition, boardroom intrigue and drama, miles and miles of unnecessary infrastructure in the wrong places, and eventually a technology that became useful, but could have been developed more intelligently.

[dgellow]

I recommend the book/audiobook „ Boom and Bust A Global History of Financial Bubbles“, it does a great job covering various bubbles, with historical context, and going through the details of regulatory and economic factors

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/boom-and-bust/D09C2E3BE...

[parpfish]

And manias are so foundational to the relatively young field of AI that they made the term “AI winter”. We should brace for the third (I think) AI winter soon

[dgellow]

When the current mania ends that will be more like a tech/software winter than just AI. I expect the public to have a complete distrust for tech companies and politics to push for strict regulations

[bluefirebrand]

I would like to see that happen. We've really let tech companies get out of control

[dofm]

The paradox of the cutbacks after the railway industry corrected is that more or less every track they got rid of would now be useful. The Beeching cut damage done to East Sussex, for example, is devastating and unfixable.

[hollerith]

Sounds like the government (which owned the entire system during Beeching) should have kept at least a right-of-way (if they have that concept in the UK) instead of selling everything.

[luke5441]

And railways are now mostly state-funded infrastructure. Seems plausible to me that the same will happen with LLMs.

[phil21]

Manias are required for humans to develop a new technology. It’s just part of the human condition.

Tilting at windmills over the stupidity of it is just something I’m trying to get over and not care about at a personal level. Nothing I can do about it either way!

[dtj1123]

> having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s

Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?

I don't and wouldn't claim that AI is completely useless, I personally use it for at least a couple hours out of each working day and feel that it boosts my productivity significantly. My point is that the kind of benefits we're seeing from AI are not the ones we expected, and the difference between expectation and reality doesn't seem to have sunk in for most. I regularly hear friends talk of the post-scarcity future which is just around the corner, something like the culture Minds from Ian M. Banks, and this pseudoreligious narrative seems to be what the big AI players are deliberately selling. What I'm actually seeing is something more akin to Mr Meeseeks from Rick and Morty.

> So, you’re committed to falling for the next one, too, eh?

Haha, no. The point was that I've seen better things in the long winters between hype cycles than in any hype cycle.

[drob518]

If you read the media from 1998 - 1999, there was than overarching message that EVERYTHING was changing. EVERY business needed to be on the Internet right now. Any business that wasn’t investing in the internet was going to be slaughtered. Brick and mortar stores were viewed as a negative on your balance sheet. All commerce would be e-commerce in just a couple of years. Startups with no revenue and no prospects for profitability for at least a decade were IPOing for hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes with 2x-3x the valuation of brick and mortar peers in the same segment who had established brands going back decades. Whenever anyone questioned the lunacy, everyone responded that, “This time it’s different because the Internet changes everything. None of the old rules apply.”

And then the crash happened and we learned that all the old rules still did apply, and while the Internet was hugely transformative, the simplistic idea that brick and mortar was bad and e-commerce was the only way forward was fundamentally wrong. Yea, surely some segments did change (Amazon killing Borders and Waldenbooks, Netflix crushing Blockbuster, etc.), but investors ultimately look at profit even if they’re willing to ignore it for a while to grab market share.

So, I suspect that AI is going to play out similarly. Right now everyone is frothy, screaming that anyone not token maxing will die. Yes, AI is going to be impactful, and, yes, it’s not going away. But the hype is surely overblown. When was the singularity supposed to arrive? Three years ago, Altman was saying it was going to be 2025, right?

[dingaling]

> Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?

To a degree. There was breathless expectation that this was a turning point for commerce, government and society and that everyone had to stake their claim now. Everything was going to change.

What was it going to change into? Beyond "$OLDTHING but on the Internet!!!", nobody really knew. Those first steps were just webbifying existing processes, stumbling along, refining what was reasonably successful and dumping that which wasn't.

It was like a black hole; from afar we could vaguely see an event horizon, but the people falling into it had no idea what was happening or where they were in the process.

[drob518]

Exactly. If I could upvote you twice, I would.

[hollerith]

There was certainly a vast gold rush around the internet with massive attention from almost everybody in journalism or in business and almost every retail investor -- at least in the US (where I was) -- but it differed from the AI hype in that there was no vision of utopia or at least not any that resonated with more than a very small fraction of the population.

The closest the internet got to becoming the focus of hopes for a great transformation of society (or the focus of an ideology or comprehensive narrative) that I saw was a conversation started by John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (published Feb 1996) and the crypto enthusiasts. Both conversations consisted mostly of libertarians (with the crypto conversation also having anarchists), which as everyone knows only ever made up 4 or 5% of the US population (but a much larger fraction of internet users in the 1990s).

Also, Teilhard de Chardin's books (written in the 1950s and 1960s) inspired people with a grand vision of the human future and in particular predicted the creation of a "noösphere" which was much like the global internet, so Teilhardists wrote some about that. But the Teilhardists were never more a tiny tiny group, much smaller even than the aforementioned crypto enthusiasts. Almost not worth mentioning.

>Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?

No. Although millions of words were written during the 1990s about the singularity (referring to it using that word specifically IIRC), even then it was always AI that was expected to bring about a utopia, never the internet. And the discussion was restricted to a few mailing lists (the extropians list, Yudkowsky's SL4 list and ISTR a transhumanism list), one or two books (e.g., Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition), Omni magazine and maybe Wired magazine.

[dofm]

> Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?

A singularity? No.

One of the early driving obsessions was a coalition dethroning Microsoft (which both did and didn't happen). A battle over closed-vs-open. That story was everywhere.

The main thing I notice is that there's a bit of a difference in the way value is created. Even in the UK the arrival of the web created a lot of early adopter winners — ISPs, design agencies, small dev shops like the one I worked for. And it generated a fair chunk of early money, changed the direction of state monopoly telecom etc.

Early well-bounded successes in 96-98 earned proper money, generated a bunch of press, generated new work. Because they had to: you didn't get access to huge pots of cash to grow with, until you had a product that was on the market and selling. The VCs didn't know you existed.

At the beginning it was small tech industry hustle and actual product creation, and a lot of companies really had the small software company playbook and ran that. You had a lot of PC resellers and systems builders who suddenly found themselves as qualified as anyone to build websites or run ISPs.

The problem after that was everyone's eyes got bigger than their bellies, the projects got too ambitious too soon, the VC money arrived even in the UK, and there were a lot of failures. I perceive the moment the firm I worked for got VC money to be the beginning of the end. I thought my bosses were altogether crazy to take the deal.

We basically were not ready to scale fast — the dot com era really scaled brand new companies in terms of number of employees and scope at a level that was at that time sort of unprecedented except maybe in the semiconductor industry.

Towards the pets.com IPO crash end of things, that is when it started to get unreal in a way that you'd recognise now — people talking about entirely new business models, and you had a running joke that if you just put "… on the internet" at the end of your elevator pitch people showered you with cash. The most insane of these being CueCat: a barcode scanner, but on the internet.

But did we think it would fuck everything up everywhere all at once? No. It was going to make us money and make it easier for everyone to buy and sell things, but it was going to create jobs (and it did for a while). It took until well into the early 2000s for the impact on retail to be truly felt.

Nowadays, companies scale enormously before they make any money, VC cash gets handed over to PhD students who only have the concepts of a plan, freemium tiers do the marketing and everyone is trying to follow the loss-leading market-share growth strategy that Amazon arguably pioneered.

The AI boom is perhaps the peak of that Amazon growth culture, "winner-takes-all" thinking, which was always insane.

[Groxx]

"most" is a hell of a claim, yea. "they're going to be useful sometimes and will stick around in some form" has been rather clear from early on (they're Transformer++, of course they'd be useful sometimes), but every session I spend with one still turns into lengthy deeply-misleading wild goose chases until I learn enough to force them down the right path[1]. quality/size of the model hasn't mattered for that, it always happens at some points (and it's just luck whether or not it's a critical point), and I see no reason to expect that it will change.

>From memory, the last time I was given a presentation on it, by actual Snowflake staff, they reported that ideal configuration results in something like ~92% accuracy due to the complexity of data at a large business ...

it's exactly this problem. nobody has solved it. lots of companies are trying to sell that they have solved it.

when I don't care about the end result that might be fine (I have used wordpress too), but frequently it ends up that they helped find relevant docs (they're quite good at finding that from vague descriptions, and it's very easy to verify) and I would have been quicker if I had simply read those docs in full. and then I'd have a more complete understanding of the space too. my biggest worry for personal use is that LLMs will write those docs in the future, and be riddled with mistakes :\

1: ...and then they're quite good code dictation tools. people who think "writing code isn't the bottleneck" just haven't spent enough time in well-understood spaces or rebuilt enough wheels. it absolutely can be a several-multiples bottleneck in day-to-day work, or when re-doing something you've done before and fully understand.

[dofm]

This hype cycle is much more like the NFT hype cycle — it's just that it has a more easily understood product. Impossible to see Beeple's Everydays as anything other than a harbinger, IMO.

[drob518]

Yea, I forgot a big one: blockchain.

[QuantumGood]

Each new iteration of the hype cycle feels "like its not hype" because the tech is more promising in new ways, but the hype comes from human perception. New tech has to fight a lot of real world and project management issues, and development morphs and slows. We don't know exactly what we have until it faces these issues.

[andy99]

Right, and there are two parallel tracks. First is the “every crack and crevice” part - “ summarize with AI”, “re write with AI”, “help me write”, “analyze with AI”, basically useless features being splattered everywhere in the name of incorporating AI while annoying the F out of everyone.

The second is the AI race / existential risk / pretending we’re Oppenheimer track which I think is the larpiest, basically pretending that LLM chatbots are some kind of super weapon and role playing accordingly.

None of this means they’re useful, AI coding, for one, obviously is a valuable tool (though there remains a lot to sort out). But the usefulness is unfortunately being overshadowed by, as you say, people not resetting expectations and instead wanting to play terminator or neuromamcer or whatever (I’m sure there are more relevant sci fi).

[lp4v4n]

It was the same thing with blockchain, who here remembers the peak delusion of IoT + smart contracts replacing human judicial systems and crypto making central banks useless?

LLMs are of course a form of progress, the same way blockchain was, but it has been baffling and cringy nonetheless to see people with a strong technical background pretending that at some point in the future the development of complex applications was going to be reduced to a few prompt lines written in English.

Once the AI fad dies and the next hype appears I told myself I'm going to jump on it to take financial advantage of it. At this point I believe that the technological cycle of hype is an almost entirely social/economic phenomenon and there is no reason not to make money from it given that people insist on this kind of irrational behavior.

[wartywhoa23]

I totally agree with all your points except welcoming the singularity.

How do you imagine your or your children's lives in the singularity?

What do you do there for a living, or which hobbies do you pursue in the best case it frees you and everyone around to pursuit nothing but hobbies?

What do you do in the worst case it pushes everyone to underground strongholds to fight machines for the survival of the humankind?

And if there's some middle ground, how is it different from today's state of affairs?

[dtj1123]

I'd play games, read books and do drugs.

It'd be different from today's state of affairs in that I wouldn't need to spend the majority of my waking hours reading stuff I don't care about and building things I don't believe need to exist in order to pay for a house I don't own. Healthcare would probably be more reliable and accessible too.

At this point though, I no longer believe this is anyone's future except the most fortunate of the fortunate, most of whom essentially live this way already.

[otikik]

> which hobbies do you pursue in the best case it frees you and everyone around to pursuit nothing but hobbies?

I could absolutely fill my days with stuff, no problem

[dinfinity]

> It hasn't worked out like that

It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year.

If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expected it to happen.

[an0malous]

> We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive.

The “Attention Is All You Need” paper came out in 2017 and OpenAI released GPT-1 in 2018. ChatGPT was released in late 2022 but that was not the beginning of LLMs. Transformers and generative AI go back even further.

[pohl]

Can you pinpoint the revolution by pinpointing moments of invention and release? Revolution takes time because it’s more about uptake, downstream effects, and feedback.

[daveguy]

The revolution is way overblown.

[bojan]

> It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive.

When we were 3 to 4 years into mobile phone revolution it was already abundantly clear that it's changing the way people leave.

Ditto when mobile phones became smartphones, and for many other tech items we got in the past decades.

As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there.

[treis]

This isn't accurate. The first mobile phone came out in 1983. It took at least a decade before they started to become common.

[pproe]

Mobile phones at that time were 800g and cost $4000. Using your logic you could say we are almost 20 years into the age of LLMs because Cleverbot was released in 2008.

[treis]

The first prototype of a cellphone was functional in the early 70s. Before that you had walkie talkies and farther back wireless communications.

We're just shy of 10 years since attention is all you need and just a few years past the first commercially viable LLMs. So in cellphones we are something like early 90s.

[tavavex]

What they're saying is that mobile phone tech didn't scale at the same rate as LLMs. How fast it takes a technology to unfold into full adoption varies depending on the industry and on what's blocking development at its inception.

Mobile phones were severely constrained by hardware that made them impractically expensive and unwieldy, and also by the time it took to set up wireless networks at a large enough scale. That's why it took mobile phones a few decades to really get going, and this is going to be different for every other technology.

LLMs, for instance, were not as hardware-constrained - we have a lot more compute now, but there wasn't a hardware paradigm shift or anything, things were already pretty good a few years ago - now it's just about scale. LLMs were also always relatively affordable - there wasn't a period where they cost $10/token, so we don't get the same kind of affordability scaling as with phones. They also utilize existing internet infrastructure and don't need to be rolled out in some new worldwide grid.

[inigyou]

Everyone uses chatgpt instead of Google now, but at least half of that is on Google.

[goatlover]

Define "everyone". Google has an AI result before the search results. People do use that. People also still use search results when they're dissatisfied with the AI answer.

[phil21]

> As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there.

And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. Fads that would pass. While the younger generations lived an entirely different lifestyle.

I’m personally seeing the same. I resisted AI being a “thing” for a long while, but since I’m around a lot of teens and young adults it was a choice of burying my head in the sand or deciding to take a look.

They are going to change society on a scale far beyond smart phones. In ways many will not see as positives, but change never goes the way one may expect.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones."

Ironic how LLM promoters like to hallucinate citations, much like the tools they espouse.

[mh-]

"Internet 'may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it'" - Daily Mail, December 2000

I recall seeing similar sentiment in other publications throughout the late 90s.

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/comments/1m6i4ui/art...

(Apologies that this was the best image host I could find for it)

[ThrowawayR2]

Surely you jest. Since people here are fans of LLMs, the Google summary describes said publication as: "The Daily Mail is widely regarded as a sensationalist tabloid with low factual credibility and a strong right-leaning bias."

I was there in the 1990s too and we were deluged with headlines trumpeting how everyone, young and old, was rushing headlong onto the Information Superhighway as the dotcom bubble kept inflating.

[reinitctxoffset]

As a vocal advocate for the use of machine intelligence in certain contexts and a skeptic of claims they are useless or always hallucinate or whatever...

It hasn't been even close to even the recent claims! It's been like three straight years where it was supposed to utterly transform society any minute now.

I think we more or less have a fragile consensus that in like, computer programming and really very little else, that on a good day you're probably going to come out ahead with the AI assist. That seems relatively uncontroversial now. But it also seems like success with AI is largely about working hard to get good at it, as a first order concern. It is not at all obvious that blind, uncritical use by anyone is a net win.

It's pretty unclear, sone might say dubious, that anyone has made serious, aboveboard money net of debt and equity, other than the hardware vendors. There's some pretty serious revenue, but it's a drop in the proverbial bucket against the outlay. There like a two trillion dollar balance sheet hole in the US alone where investment into AI has gone.

While I personally don't agree with them, multiple S-tier machine learning researchers think we've got our wheels stuck in the mud, that autoregressive decoder architectures on a tokin-suffix pre-train is tapped out as a paradigm.

It's ok to say "AI is starting to get useful in pretty durable ways" and not sound like an Anthropic shareholder/employee, i.e. completely full of shit.

[uwamamama]

Uncritical use of today's AI beats all of the optimized use of yesterday's AI by far. I think people like the idea that their success is a result of their efforts, but this is just not the truth.

[reinitctxoffset]

I don't think anyone's disputing that the models are better than a year ago (though clearly all this, recursive self improvement stuff is utterly hypothetical and that's being generous, most of the progress has been on cost and fit and finish stuff). When it's on the plan, I'll use Fable for some stuff. If I'm paying for Opus? It's 4.5 or 4.6 which were dramatically better aligned and token efficient in the trace at a capability gap that's "you win some and lose some".

That can be true while it also being the case that to someone who has no idea how this stuff works under the hood, it's basically Dunning Kreuger in a box. The next person to go /u/PhdInEverything on me with Fable is getting an education in the history of hardware support for mixed precision training or something. Fable is a masterclass in refusal to ground and a dozen other alignment catastrophes.

So yeah, the models are still getting a little better, but from here out I think it's rapidly becoming a skill game.

[idiotsecant]

It's clear that while LLM progress is continuing, it's at something like a linear rate, or slower.

The singularity requires exponential improvement. That's not happening. Maybe we will develop something that sets that off, but there's no indication of that right now.

[dinfinity]

Yet. If the exponential improvement had already started, the singularity would already have happened or happen very, very soon.

The logic has always been that the AI would have to have significant tools and agency to do self-improvement for the singularity to occur. This is exactly the thing that a bunch of the AI labs are working on hard right now.

[daveguy]

Sorry, but labs working hard doesn't make non-polynomial problems suddenly polynomial.

[tim333]

I think people think things will go faster than they do. The AI revolution will probably be a bit like the industrial revolution which took a couple of centuries to go from Newcomen's steam engine of 1712 to mass produced cars and the like. With AI, Turing came up with his test in 1950 and it's taken about 75 years to get to something that looks like passing. Give it time.

[vb-8448]

We are still in time for the "revolution" ... but it will take longer and won't look like than most thought.

We still need a bubble pop to drive out all nonsense ideas and paths.