Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate

At a beach restaurant the other night I kept hearing a loud American voice cut across all conversation, going on and on about “AI” and how it would get into all human “workflows” (new buzzword?). His confidence and loudness was only matched by his obvious lack of understanding of how LLMs actually work.

A big issue that a lot of these tech companies seem to have is that they don't understand what people want; they come up with an idea and then shove it into everything. There are services that I have actively stopped using because they started cramming AI into things; for example I stopped dual-booting with Windows and became Linux-only.

AI is legitimately interesting technology which definitely has specialized use-cases, e.g. sorting large amounts of data, or optimizing strategies within highly restrained circumstances (like chess or go). However, 99% of what people are pushing with AI these days as a member of the general public just seems like garbage; bad art and bad translations and incorrect answers to questions.

I do not understand all the hype around AI. I can understand the danger; people who don't see that it's bad are using it in place of people who know how to do things. But in my teaching for example I've never had any issues with students cheating using ChatGPT; I semi-regularly run the problems I assign through ChatGPT and it gets enough of them wrong that I can't imagine any student would be inclined to use ChatGPT to cheat multiple times after their grade the first time comes in. (In this sense, it's actually impressive technology - we've had computers that can do advanced math highly accurately for a while, but we've finally developed one that's worse at math than the average undergrad in a gen-ed class!)

There is this seeming need to discredit AI from some people that goes overboard. Some friends and family who have never really used LLMs outside of Google search feel compelled to tell me how bad it is.

But generative AIs are really good at tasks I wouldn't have imagined a computer doing just a few year ago. Even if they plateaued in place where they are right now it would lead to major shakeups in humanity's current workflow. It's not just hype.

The part that is over hyped is companies trying to jump the gun and wholesale replace workers with unproven AI substitutes. And of course the companies who try to shove AI where it doesn't really fit, like AI enabled fridges and toasters.

"Built to do my art and writing so I can do my laundry and dishes" -- Embodied agents is where the real value is. The chatbots are just fancy tech demos that folks started selling because people were buying.

So you're saying we wont have any crowdsourced blockchain Web 2.0 AIs?

Education is one area where GenAI is having a huge impact. Teachers work with text and language all day long. They have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ideally, for example, they should "differentiate" for EACH and EVERY student. Of course that almost never happens, but second best is to differentiate for specific groups - students with IEPs (special ed), English Learners, maybe advanced / gifted.

More tech aware teachers are now using ChatGPT and friends to help them do this. They are (usually) subject area experts, so they can quickly read through a generated or modified text and fix or remove errors - hallucinations are less (ime) of an issue in this situation. Now, instead of one reading that only a few students can actually understand, they have three at different levels, each with their own DOK questions.

People have started saying "AI won't replace teachers. Teachers who use AI will replace teachers who don't."

Of course, it will be interesting to see what happens when VC funding dries up, and the AI companies can't afford to lose money on every single interaction. Like with everything else in USA education, better off districts may be able to afford AI, and less-well-off (aka black / brown / poor) districts may not be able to.

But the line must go up!

I'm buying semis. I don't see AI, construed broadly, as ever shrinking from its current position.

Bye bye XBox ._.

oh wow who would have guessed that business consultancy companies are generally built on bullshitting about things which they dont really have a grasp of

Big tech is out of ideas and needs AI to work in order to drive growth.

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To have a bubble you need companies with no clear path to monetization, being over-valued to an extreme degree. This leaves me wondering : what company specifically ? Are they talking about nVidia ? OpenAI ? MidJourney ? Or the slew of LLM-powered SaaS products that have started appearing ? How exactly are we defining "over-valuation" here ? Are we talking about the tech industry as a whole ?

We often invite the comparison to the DotCom bubble but that's apples to oranges. You had companies making social networks for dogs or similar bullshit, valued in the billions and getting a ticker at the stock market before making a single dime. Or companies with outlandish promises such as delivering to any home in the US, in <1 hour, for a low price, and building warehouses by the hundreds before having a storefront. What would be the 2024 equivalent ? If a bubble is about to deflate then there should be dozens of comparable examples.

I saved a lot of time due to ChatGPT. Need to sign up some of my pupils for a competition by uploading their data in a csv-File to some plattform? Just copy and paste their data into chsatgpt and prompt it to create the file. The boss (headmaster) wants some reasoning why I need some paid time for certain projects? Let ChatGPT do the reasoning. Need some exercises for one of my classes that doesn't really come to grips with while-loops? let ChatGPT create those exercises (some smartasses will of course have ChatGPT then solve those exercises). The list goes on...

"Today’s hype will have lasting effects that constrain tomorrow’s possibilities."

Nope. No it won't. I'd love to have the patience to be more diplomatic but they're just wrong... and dumb.

I'm getting so sick of these anti AI cultists who seem to be made up of grumpy tech nerds behaving like "I was using AI before it was cool" hipsters and panicking artists and writers. Everyone needs to calm their tits right down. AI isn't going anywhere. It's giving creative and executive options to millions of people that just weren't there before.

We're in an adjustment phase right now and boundaries are being re-drawn around what constitutes creativity. My leading theory at the moment is that we'll all mostly eventually settle down to the idea that AI is just a tool. Once we're used to it and less starry eyed about it's output then individual creativity, possibly supported by AI tools, will flourish again. It's going to come down to the question of whether you prefer reading something cogitated, written, drawn or motion rendered by AI or you enjoy the perspective of a human being more. Both will be true in different scenarios I expect.

Honestly, I've had to nope out of quite a few forums and servers permanently now because all they do in there is circlejerk about the death of AI. Like this one theory that keeps popping up that image generating AI specifically is inevitably going to collapse in on itself and stop producing quality images. The reverse is so obviously true but they just don't want to see it. Otherwise smart people are just being so stubborn with this and it's, quite frankly, depressing to see.

Also, the tech nerds arguing that AI is just a fancy word and pixel regurgitating engine and that we'll never have an AGI are probably the same people that were really hoping Data would be classified as a sentient lifeform when Bruce Maddox wanted to dissassemble him in "The Measure of a Man".

How's that for whiplash?

I have no idea how people can consider this to be a hype bubble especially after the o3 release. It smashed the ARC AGI benchmark on the performance front. It ranks as the 175th best competitive coder in the world on Codeforces' leaderboard.

o3 proved that it is possible to have at least an expert AGI if not a Virtuoso AGI (according to Deep mind's definition of AGI). Sure, it's not economical yet. But it will get there very soon (just like how the earlier GPTs were a lot dumber and took a lot more energy than the newer, smaller parameter models).

Please remember - fight to seize the means of production. Do not fight the means of production themselves.