Hardly the evidence of PMF. There is always something new in the zeitgeist, that every one is talking about, some more so than others .
2 years before it was VR, few years before that NFTs and blockchain everything, before that it was self driving cars before that personal voice assistants like Siri and so on .
- self driving has not transformed us into minority report and despite how far it has come it cannot in next 30 years be ubiquitous, even if the l5 magic tech exists today in every new car sold it will take 15 years for current cars to lifecycle.
- Crypto has not replaced fiat currency , even in most generous reading you can see it as store of value like gold or whatever useless baubles people assign arbitrary value to, but has no traction for 3 out of other 4 key functions of money .
- VR is not transformative to every day life and is 5 fundamental breakthroughs away.
- Voice assistants are useless setting alarms and selecting music 10 years in.
There has been meaningful and measurable in each of these fields, but none of them have met the high bar of world transforming .
AI is aiming for much higher bar of singularity and consciousness. Just in every hype cycles we are in peak of inflated expectations, we will reach a plateau of productivity where it is will be useful in specific areas (as it already is) and people will move on to the next fad.
It'll take over when people find it cheaper to ride robotaxis than to own a vehicle at all. That's potentially a much quicker transition, requiring significantly fewer new vehicles.
I absolutely would do that. Sometimes I already do wait that kind of time for a taxi or bus. Having the robo taxi turn up in ten minutes from when I decided I wanted to go to the shop would be fantastic.
If I already own a car, for which am paying an emi and no hope of selling for good value (because market is dropping as newest buyers disappear) it won’t make economic sense for me till I generate LTV from the car to switch over .
Either way it till take 1-2 decades after ubiquitous L5 availability, even if that was possible at all and soon
just as a silly personal example, I took a car to the shop and got Uber credits. my wife was heading into the city for an event (had to deal with both traffic and parking) and I was like “take a free Uber” and she was like “no way, driving my own car…” my daughter on the other hand…
I never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself, and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being re-dubbed as a dystopian nightmare.
> AI is aiming for much higher bar of singularity and consciousness.
No, it's aiming to be economically useful.
"The singularity" is what a lot of people think is an automatic consequence of being able to solve tasks related to AI; me, I think that's how we sustained Moore's Law so long (computers designing computers, you can't place a billion transistors by hand, but even if you could the scale is now well into the zone where quantum tunnelling has to be accounted for in the design), and that "singularities" are a sign something is wrong with the model.
"Consciousness" has 40 definitions, and is therefore not even a meaningful target.
> Just in every hype cycles we are in peak of inflated expectations, we will reach a plateau of productivity where it is will be useful in specific areas (as it already is) and people will move on to the next fad.
In that at least, we agree.
Isn't that funny? It speaks exactly to the GP's point about how frothing and uninformative the "zeitgeist" can be, as my experience happens to have been the opposite of yours. The people I happened to be casually brushing around during those earlier fads happened to be hip to them, or maybe my ears were more attentive, and so I heard them mentioned more often and with more enthusiasm.
In contrast, most of what I happen to hear about generative AI, outside of HN, tends to be idly laughing at its foibles and misrepresentation if it's mentioned at all.
I don't expect you to have the same experience as me, but I'm careful not to assume too much based on either of ours.
The idea that it's some fad with no utility or that the general public knows little about it is at this point laughable. It's the software product with by far the fastest adoption any software product has ever seen.
And if people want to lump that in with bitcoin or VR or whatever, shrug, i just don't know what to say.
Einstein thought that way too because his model predicted singularities in space-time fabric. Turns out he was wrong. Nowadays we call them blackholes and have images of them too.
(1) the event horizon was the first singularity, but that turned out to be a free choice of the coordinate system, i.e. a mistake in the maths — and we can't see past the event horizons anyway, so we don't know what happens on the other side of them even though they're not "real" singularities
(2) the point in the centre where the geodesics stop, which everyone in the field knows is incompatible with (a) the assumption in the maths of relativity that spacetime is smooth and can be differentiated everywhere, and (b) quantum mechanics
This is not to discount that amazing accomplishment but to point out that, in addition to misrepresenting what the singularity is in a black hole, you also misrepresented what the image of a black hole is.
AI isn't really a fad. It's going to something more like electricity, say.
It's a novel thing. It's not going anywhere. It makes some things easier, sometimes, in both personal and professional settings. But you're not at a big loss without it and in many cases your choice to do without is a choice that favors quality, control, nuance, and skill refinement.
Looking back at the history of electricity, there is early stuff from the Greeks and then:
Faraday's homopolar disc generator 1831
Light bulb 1870
Transistor 1947
etc. So quite leisurely.
For the rest of us in HN it was easier to judge on much mileage will get, but a long time in each cycle we were in the minority, just like the AI skeptics including me and many here are today on how much we will value get.
Don’t get are wrong, AI is more real and more useful than the things before it, but everything is on a spectrum of success - some more and some less, but none of it has been or will be world changing or truly global.
The true breakthroughs rarely get public or even tech community attention until late in the cycle although their progress is public and can be tracked, like with EUV or mRNA or GLP-1 etc . Others which are incremental changes like 5G or cheaper smartphones do not get as much attention as their impact should warrant especially compared to the fads
Hype cycles don’t correlate well with real tech cycles
* technically not all blockchains because git and BitTorrent are both also hash trees and therefore non-currency block-chains, but definitely the cryptocurrency uses of them.
However the hype cycle just as now in AI claimed it will change everything, not hey here is interesting new thing and it is going be used in select applications . Nobody is investing billions and billions on that pitch
I notice that doesn't say what happened to the throughput of "diagnose, fix, and reduce technical debt." :p
However that kind of user in my experience is rare , vast majority are junior developers who do not understand the output well enough and now generate 5x of it that I have to review and they no longer make the effort to understand any foundational concept .
This is not new, the rise in popularity of StackOverflow created a class of developers who didn’t want to spend the time to learn properly reading the manual.
In itself reducing the skill level needed to be productive is not inherently bad, it was PhD in CS could only program in 70s and 80s. Each generation of tech and abstraction opened up software development to newer class of employees.
However the difference is the industry desperately needed expansion each time because PCs became popular or the desktop or mobile devices etc . There was enormous demand for new applications both personal and professional which couldn’t be satisfied with kind of volume CS research programs could fulfill.
There is no such transformation currently , there aren’t a new class of users or major applications coming up in a such high volume, that quality drop is compensated by quantity .
There is lot more need for higher quality products as software market is plateauing from the highs mobile adoption gave.
Are you so deep in the SV tech echo chamber that you can’t distinguish between tech bro / snake oil salesman hype and something that actual normal people are engaged by?
The only people talking about NFTs in a non-disparaging way were delusional in large part because they themselves bought into it wanted to egg others on. NFTs were just a stupid faddish speculative ‘commodity’ market. It’s a completely different thing.
Ditto with “blockchain”. That well was positioned by people trying to make money from cryptocurrencies. The mechanics allowed for that. Again, it’s a completely different thing. Civilians with no vested interest weren’t sitting in restaurants singing the praises of decentralised ledgers or monkey pictures on someone’s Google Drive. I assure you. I also assure you that this IS however happening with ChatGPT. Out here in the real world, we see it.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues with LLMs, both philosophically and in therms of their actual output. This doesn’t mean there aren’t the same old SV snake oil salespeople and YouTube wannabes trying to push some BS products and courses. But let’s not pretend for a second like this is usefully comparable to “blockchain” and “NFTs”.
Yes, There is close connection to SV hype cycle and what happens in mainstream, most mainstream ones originate in SV but the ones I mentioned specifically impacted the larger public not just SV tech sphere
Singularity is at least definable…Although I think it is not really the bar required to be really impactful. If we get an AI system that can do the work of like 60% of hardcore knowledge workers, 80% of office workers, and 95% of CEOs/politicians and other pablumists, it could be really change how the economy works without actually being a singularity.
We must have a different meaning of ubiquitous. Ubiquitous means "found everywhere" not "has eliminated everything else."
You don't even need to cycle the fleet once to meet the definition of ubiquitous. If you can get a self driving car in any city and many towns, you see them all over the place, and a third of trips are done with them, that'd be ubiquitous in my book.
I don't see why you couldn't get there in 3 decades. I don't think it's likely in 12 years but it seems possible in that timeframe.
Getting a slightly better version of Waymo in SF is just augmenting for a poor public transit with a very American car solution .
It scales pretty poorly and cannot replace good public transit, at best can augment them as last mile connectivity .
There is value to those of course and is disruptive to a sector, it is still a specific use case and not world changing. You are only disrupting the taxi industry not driving itself .
The claims at the time was not we are going replace taxis with robotaxis , but driving itself will be a thing of the past. That is the nature of hype cycles .
