[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.