I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype
217 comments
·April 18, 2025sqs
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?
Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today?
This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025:
https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518
Whence I quote:
i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution
Here's another one with an excerpt of an interview with Demis Hssabis, dated April 17, 2025:
https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/1912929020905206233
Whence I quote:
" I think maybe in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease."
Nobel Prize Winner and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on how AI can revolutionize drug discovery doing "science at digital speed."
da_chicken
The last time I remember the hype being even remotely real was Web 2.0. And most of everything that made that hypeworthy is long gone (interoperability and open standards like RSS or free APIs) or turned out to be genuinely awful ("social media was a mistake") or has become far worse than what it replaced (SaaS).
doginasuit
It is an interesting comparison. Databases are objectively the more important technology, if we somehow lost AI the world would be equal parts disappointed and relieved. If we somehow lost database technology we'd be facing a dystopian nightmare.
If we cure all disease in the next 10-15 years, databases will be just as important as AI to that outcome. Databases supported a technology renaissance that reshaped the world on a level that is difficult to comprehend. But because most of the world doesn't interact directly with databases, as a technology it is not the focus of enthusiastic rhetoric.
LLMs are further along tech-chain and they might be an important part of world-changing human achievements, we won't know until we get there. In contrast, we can be certain databases were important. I imagine the people who were influential in their advancement understood how important the tech would be, even if they didn't breathlessly go on about it.
agarren
My favorite that I’ve heard a couple times is “solve math” and/or “solve physics”
Altman’s claimed LLMs will figure out climate change. Solid stuff.
nl
Sure, databases didn't get as much hype but that's partly because they are old.
Look at something more recent: "cloud", "social networking", "blockchain", "mobile".
Plenty of hype! Some delivered, some didn't.
layman51
I’m not sure how hyped up databases were during their advent, but what do you mean “by partly because they are old?” The phonograph prototypes that were made by Thomas Alva Edison are old and they were hyped in a way. People called him the “Wizard of Menlo Park” for his work because they were seeing machines that could talk (or at least reproduce sounds in the same way photographs let you reproduce sights.)
UncleMeat
Even blockchain didn't have the degree of hype as this AI stuff.
The CEO of Google said that AI would be as profound as fire in revolutionizing humanity. People are saying that it will replace all intellectual labor in the near term and then all physical labor soon afterwards.
1over137
AI is old too.
YeGoblynQueenne
Which of those things claimed it would be "like the renaissance" or that we'd cure all diseases?
In the clip I link above Hassabis says he hopes that in 10-15 years' time we'll be looking back on the way we do medicine today like the way they did it in the middle ages. In 10-15 years time. Modern medicine - you know, antibiotics, vaccines, transplants, radiotherapy, anti-retrovirals, the whole shebang, like medieval times.
Are you saying - what are you saying? Who has said things like that ever before in the tech industry? Azure? Facebook? Ethereum? Who?
crystal_revenge
> Are you saying someone hyped ... databases?
I was too young to remember databases but I vividly remember people (sometimes even myself) thinking “the web”, “smart phones”, “e-commerce“,“social media” and “cloud computing” all being “hype”.
Thinking about this was ultimately what led me to giving up my AI skepticism and diving into the space.
At this point I actually don’t know how people sincerely think AI is “hype”. For me, and many people I know, there are multiple AI tools that I’m not sure how I would get by without.
alganet
The use of semantic web and linked data (a type of distributed database and ontology map) for protein folding (therefore, medical research too) was predicted by many and even used by some.
Databases were of key interest. Namely, the problem of relating different schemas.
So, yes. _It was claimed_ that database tech could help. And it probably did so already. To what extent I really don't know. Those consortiums included many big players.
It never hyped, of course. It did not stood the test of time either (as far as I know).
Claims, as you can see, don't always fully develop into reality.
LLMs now need to stand a similar test of time. Will they become niche and forgotten like semweb? We will know. Have patience.
dclowd9901
You're taking a sliver of truth as though it dismantles their entire argument. The point was, nobody was _claiming_ databases would cure all diseases. That's the argument around the hype of AI here.
sgustard
I guess OP hated it when Bill Gates said "personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created."
Or Vint Cerf, "The Internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world."
chewbacha
Yea, and the internet never went through a hype bubble that ultimately burst ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
roywiggins
it doesn't really compare, but the "paperless office" was hyped for decades
grg0
Some issues with this "hype":
- Company hires tens of people to build an undefined problem. They have a solution (and even that is rather nebulous) and are looking for a problem to solve.
- Company pushes the thing down your throat. The goal is not clear. They make authoritative-sounding statements on how it improves productivity, or throughput, or some other metric, only to retract later when you pull off those people into a private meeting.
- People who claim what all the things that nebulous solution can accomplish when, in fact, nobody really knows because the thing is in a research phase. These are likely the "charlatans" OP is referring to, and s/he's not wrong.
- Learning "next hot thing" instead of the principles that lead to it and, worse still, apply "next hot thing" in the wrong context when the trade-offs have reversed. My own example: writing a single-page web application with "next hot JS framework" when you haven't even understood the trade-off between client-side and server-side rendering (this is just my example, not OP's, but you can probably relate.)
etc. etc. Perhaps the post isn't very well articulated, but it does make several points. If you haven't experienced any of the above, then you're just not in the kind of company that OP probably has worked at. But the things they describe are very real.
I agree there is nothing wrong with "hype" per se, but the author is using the word in a very particular context.
Mawr
What a shallow, negative post. Can't believe you're implying that there's no outsized hype about AI. At least bring some arguments forth instead of asking silly hypothetical questions.
> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?
Well, dear gosh. You look at the objective qualities of the technology then compare it to what's being said about it. For stuff like AI, blockchain etc. the hype surrounding them is orders of magnitude greater than their utility. Less so for AI than the near-useless blockchain, but still disproportionate.
AI has an obvious downside in its inability to ever be the source of truth. So then all you need to do is look for the companies using it as such, even for something as simple as phone support and you've got your hype-driven bone-headed decision making right there: [1] [2].
> Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented".
Very clever wording, you can make "one of the most beneficial tools ever invented" fit basically anything with a little bit of spin. Make up your mind instead of inventing weasel statements.
> How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential?
Oh I'm sure most of them do. Does not contradict "greedy, careless, unskilled" in any way.
Guthur
There are issues with our current economic model and it blows down to rent. The service need model is allowing the owners and controllers of capital to set up systems that allow them to extract as much rent as possible, AI is just another approach to this.
And then if it is successful for building, as you say we'll have yet another production issue as that building is essentially completely automatic. Read how over production has affect society for pretty much ever and then ask yourself will it really be good for the masses.
Additionally all the media is so thoroughly captured that we're in "1984" yet so few people seem to realise it. The elites will start wars, crush people's livelihoods and brainwash everyone into being true believers as they march their sons to war while living in poverty.
mariusor
It's sad to see such a terrible comment at the top of the discussion. You start with an ad-hominem against author assuming they want to "look smart" by writing negatively about hype, you construct a straw-man to try to make your point, and you barely touch on any of the points made by them, and when you do, you pick on the weakest one. Shame.
null
bestvibecoder
[flagged]
ninetyninenine
It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad.
AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage.
I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two years when a rudimentary version of it is finally realized.
What especially pisses me off is the know it all tone, like they knew all along it's garbage and that they're above it all. These people are tools with no opinions other then hype = bad and logic = nonexistent.
latexr
> I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI
It was never this level of AI. The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about. No one ever fantasised about AI which couldn’t accurately count the number of letters in a common word or that would give you provably wrong information in an assertive authoritative tone. No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything.
mjr00
> No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything.
This has basically been why it's a non-starter in a lot of (most?) business applications.
If your dishwasher failed to clean anything 20% of the time, would you rely on it? No, you'd just wash the dishes by hand, because you'd at least have a consistent result.
That's been the result of AI experimentation I've seen: it works ~80% of the time, which sounds great... except there's surprisingly few tasks where a 20% fail rate is acceptable. Even "prompt engineering" your way to a 5% failure/inaccuracy rate is unacceptable for a fully automated solution.
So now we're moving to workflows where AI generates stuff and a human double checks. Or the AI parses human text into a well-defined gRPC method with known behavior. Which can definitely be helpful, but is a far cry from the fantasized AI in sci-fi literature.
simonw
"The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about."
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - some of the earliest mainstream AI science fiction (1968, before even the Apollo moon landing!) was very much about an AI you couldn't trust.
HDThoreaun
> It was never this level of AI.
People have been dreaming of an AI that can pass the turing test for close to a century. We have accomplished that. I get moving the goalposts since the turing test leaves a lot to be desired, but pretending you didnt is crazy. We have absolutely accomplished the stuff of dreams with AI
ninetyninenine
>It was never this level of AI.
You're completely out of it. We couldn't even get AI to hold a freaking conversation. It was so bad we came up with this thing called the turing test and that was the benchmark.
Now people like you are all, like "well it's obvious the turing test was garbage".
No. It's not obvious. It's the hype got to your head. If we found a way to travel at light speed for 3 dollars the hype would be insane and in about a year we get people like you writing blog posts about how light speed travel is the dumbest thing ever. Oh man too much hype.
You think LLMs are stupid? Sometimes we all just need to look in the mirror and realize that humans have their own brand of stupidity.
jackphilson
Don't be mad about their opinions, be grateful for the arbitrage opportunity
ClumsyPilot
I like this approach, the challenge us that without a good grasp of finance it is really hard to leverage these opportunities
calmbell
Please find me someone with any background in technology who thinks AI is complete garbage (zero value or close to it). The author doesn't think so, they assert that "perhaps 10% of the AI hype is based upon useful facts" and "AI functions greatly as a "search engine" replacement". There is a big difference between thinking something is garbage and thinking something is a massive bubble (in the case of AI, this could be the technology is worth hundreds of billions rather than trillions).
ninetyninenine
Nobody is talking about a financial bubble. That's orthoganol.
Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing.
The blog post is talking about the hype in general and about AI in general. It is not just referring to the financial opportunity.
You can use chatGPT for free. Does that mean it's total shit because openAI allowed you to use it for free? No. It's still freaking revolutionary.
asdf12341
Yeah well this hype comes with a lot of financial investment, which means I get affected when the market crash.
If people makes cool thing on their own money ( or just not consume as much of our total capital ), and it turns out not as affective as they would like, I would be nice to them.
gibbitz
Yeah the effectiveness of the hype on investment is more important than the effectiveness of the technology. AI isn't the product, the promise of the stock going up is. Buy while you can, the Emperor's New Clothes are getting threadbare.
eschaton
Sounds like you bought the hype about LLMs without any understanding anything about LLMs and are now upset that the hype train is crashing because it was based on promises that not only wouldn’t but couldn’t be kept.
spiderice
> hype train is crashing
According to who? Perhaps the people who aren't paying attention. People who use AI frequently and see the rate of progress are still quite hyped.
nativeit
There are a lot of IQ points in this comment section being dedicated to debating the semantics of the word “hype” rather than engaging with the substance of what the article discusses.
cafed00d
To me, AI hype seems to be the most tangible/real hype in a decade.
Ever since mobile & cloud era at their peaks in 2012 or 2014, we’ve had Crypto, AR, VR, and now AI.
I have some pocket change bitcoin, ethereum, played around for 2 minutes on my dust-gathering Oculus & Vision Pro; but man, oh man! Am I hooked to ChatGpt or what!
It’s truly remarkably useful!
You just can’t get this type of thing in one click before.
For example, here’s my latest engineering productivity boosting query: “when using a cfg file on the cmd line what does "@" as a prefix do?”
mcdeltat
It's astonishing how the two camps of LLM believers vs LLM doubters has evolved even though we as people are largely very similar, doing similar work.
Why is it that e.g. you believe LLMs are truly revolutionary, whereas e.g. I think they are not? What are the things you are doing with LLMs day to day that are life changing, which I am not doing? I'm so curious.
When I think of things that would be revolutionary for my job, I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me - creating an application that is correct, maintainable, efficient, and scalable. That would solve 80% of my job. From my trials of LLMs, they are nowhere near that level, and barely pass the "correct" requirement.
Further, the cynic in me wonders what work we can possibly be doing where text generation is revolutionary. Keeping in mind that most of our jobs are ultimately largely pointless anyway, so that implies a limit on the true usefulness of any tool. Why does it matter if I can make a website in 1/10th the time if the website doesn't contribute meaningfully to society?
bredren
> I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me
It could be that you’re falling into a complete solution fallacy. LLMs can already be great at working each of these problems. It helps to work on a small piece of these problems. It does take practice and any sufficiently complicated problem will require practice and multiple attempts.
But the more you practice with them, you start getting a feel for it and these things start to eat away at this 80% you’re describing.
It is not self driving, if anything, software engineering, automation is only accessible to those who nerd out at it, the same way using a PC used to be sending email or programming.
A lot of the attention is on being able to run increasingly capablemodels on machines with less resources. But there’s not much use to fuss over Gemini 2.5 Pro if you don’t already have a pretty good feel for deep interaction with sonnet or GPT 4o.
It is already impressive and can seriously accelerate software engineering.
mcdeltat
But the complete solution fallacy is what the believers are claiming will occur, isn't it? I'm 100% with you that LLMs will make subsets of problems easier. Similar to how great progress in image recognition has been made with other ML techniques. That seems like a very reasonable take. However, that wouldn't be "revolutionary", I don't think. That's not "fire all your developers because most jobs will be replaced by AI in a few years" (a legitimate sentiment shared to me from an AI-hyped colleague).
ryandrake
I think the difference is between people who accept nondeterministic behavior from their computers and those who don’t. If you accept your computer being confidently wrong some unknowable percentage of the time, then LLMs are miraculous and game changing software. If you don’t, then the same LLMs are defective and unreliable toys, not suitable as serious tools.
People have different expectations out of computers, and that accounts for the wildly different views on current AI capabilities.
mcdeltat
Perhaps. Then how do you handle the computer being confidently wrong a large proportion of the time? From my experience it's inaccurate in proportion to the significance of the task. So by the time it's writing real code it's more wrong than right. How can you turn that into something useful? I don't think the system around us is configured to handle such an unreliable agent. I don't want things in my life to be less reliable, I want them to be more reliable.
(Also if you exist in an ecosystem where being confidently wrong 70% of the time is acceptable, that's kinda suspect and I'll return to the argument of "useless jobs")
mmcnl
I guess everyone has a different interpretation of revolutionary. Some people think ChatGPT is just faster search. But 10x faster search is revolutionary in terms of productivity.
lgrapenthin
Your example is a better search engine. The AI hype however is the promise that it will be smarter (not just more knowledgeable) than humans and replace all jobs.
And it isn't on the way there. Just today, a leading state of the art model, that supposedly passed all the most difficult math entry exams and whatever they "benchmark", reasoned with the assumption of "60 days in January". It would simply assume that and draw conclusions, as if that were normal. It also wasn't able to corrrectly fill out all possible scores in a two player game with four moves and three rules, that I made up. It would get them wrong over and over.
kristianp
It's not a better search engine, it's qualitatively different to search. An LLM compose its answers based on what you ask it. Search returns pre-existing texts to you.
lgrapenthin
If search was only about finding existing texts, LLMs would be qualitatively worse, as they frequently misquote or even invent non existing sources.
asdfman123
There's three types of people w.r.t hype: smart people who resist hype, smart people who want to profit off of it, and dumb people who like it.
The first type of person already agrees with you. The second type knows but doesn't care. The third isn't going to read this article.
jackphilson
Fourth type: smart people who like hype because hype is fun and having fun is good.
eulgro
That's the third type actually. But for some reason GP decided to qualify each type as either smart or dumb. Here's put better: there's 3 types of people: those who resist hype, those who profit off of it, and those who enjoy it.
tinco
Exactly, and since it's good to profit, and it's good to have fun, surely it's the smart people who are doing that, and the dumb people who are resisting.
I certainly feel dumb for dismissing crypto as only an effective store of value with some minor improvements over the status quo (and some downsides) without considering the implications.
el_benhameen
I imagine that the people who profit off of it enjoy it too, though? So perhaps we have a “hype enjoyers” superset that includes “profiteers” and “suckers”, but then we need “neutrals” or something to describe those who enjoy it without making or losing money. And then from there …
asdfman123
Could also be the second type in denial about themselves too
shikon7
The really smart people are those who figure out which part of the hype is real and which is exaggerated.
nickysielicki
No, the really smart people, and I mean really really smart, are the ones who figured out how to teach rocks to think.
corytheboyd
I’ll do whatever shit the industry wants me to do, I don’t particularly care if it’s dumb. I mean, it doesn’t FEEL great to work on dumb things, but at the end of the day, I’m around to help implement whatever the paycheck writer wants to see. I genuinely don’t mean that negatively either, I feel like I’m just describing… employment?
Software just isn’t a core part of my identity. I like building it, I like most of the other people who write it, and I like most/some of the people paying me to build it. When I’m done for the day, I very much stop thinking about it (not counting shower thoughts and whatnot on deeper problems)
So what if I end up fixing slop code from AI hype in a couple years? I have been cleaning up slop code from other people for 15 years. I am painfully aware of slop I left for others to deal with too (sorry).
So yeah anyway, your comment resonated. Hype is annoying, but if it sticks around and becomes dominant, my point is, whatever, okay, new thing to learn.
asdfman123
Yeah, that's the mature perspective. Having a job is always going to involve some level of bullshit and you have to make peace with it.
angarg12
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI.
Cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there. I fail to see how that's hype.
re-thc
> I fail to see how that's hype.
Server management, data center and related business existed ages ago. What's hype is this cloud? People are made to believe that cloud is not a server or servers.
It's an enhancement sure, but not something completely new or different.
> it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there
And most of them would be fine without it. Rent some racks. Run some servers. That's exactly why it's hype.
babyent
It is a service layer that enabled organizational efficiency.
bmink
The hype is that “cloud” is and makes everything magically better / easier / more secure / more efficient etc. Many companies jumped head first into large-scale cloud migrations and buildouts without any thought about where and how “cloud” makes sense, what the risks / downsides / true costs are, etc. Just like they are doing now with AI.
wewewedxfgdf
A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul...
latexr
The amount of misuse this quote gets is as absurd as it is tiresome. People were using it to defend NFTs too. Someone’s opinion on one thing says nothing about someone else’s opinion about a different thing.
mjr00
Yeah, the Krugman quote gets pulled out around literally everything. Bitcoin/Blockchain/NFTs, Metaverse, AR/VR, I'm sure some other things I was forgetting.
For every Krugman "the internet will be as useful as the fax machine" quote, there's a corresponding quote like Gartner in 2022 - "Gartner Predicts 25% of People Will Spend At Least One Hour Per Day in the Metaverse by 2026."[0]
[0] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-02-0...
noosphr
The point is that the upside of investing in a technology before everyone else does is huge.
The downside is whatever you end up investing it in.
Hype is then technologies fighting for that slice of the pie.
The upside to current AI is that we've solved natural language interaction with computers. We have the Star Trek computer you can talk to. You probably don't want to because natural language is naturally terrible at exactness which is why humans have endless meetings to discuss the next meeting about next quarters targets.
This was science fiction in 2020. Today I can do it on a top end consumer grade GPU.
By comparison blockchain is bullshit - to find out why just ask what the clearance rate is of the bitcoin network. You won't change the world at 7 transactions a second. If someone manages to build a block chain that can clear 10 million transactions a second you'd have something on par with the current AI hype train because it would be a legitimately useful finance tool and it will be worth investing billions in.
latexr
> We have the Star Trek computer you can talk to.
We certainly do not. I haven’t watched all of Star Trek, but from what I did the computer always understood the question and either executed it perfectly or was unable to comply for some reason outside of its control and broke down exactly what it was so the characters could fix it or find an alternative. Characters didn’t regularly have to verify the computer’s work, they just knew it was correct.
Izkata
You're almost describing the lightning network, which depending on where you get your numbers can handle around 10-40x the transactions per second of Visa or MasterCard, neither of which are above 70k in anything I found with a quick search.
Granted it sounds like the lightning network has other issues.
Maxamillion96
He’s 100 percent correct and if you disagree you underestimate the effects of the Fax Machine on the economy and over-estimate the effects of the internet of 2005.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug...
yjftsjthsd-h
> most people have nothing to say to each other!
Now to be fair. He wasn't wrong in all his claims.
brikym
I guess it works if you replace the internet with email and if people don't include spammers.
parineum
Even though the Internet has displaced fax machines, fax machines enabled instant, worldwide, legal (signing contracts and such) communication.
That's not insignificant. They're stupid now because we have the Internet but they were a major leap in conducting business.
wewewedxfgdf
Sure there's plenty of hype. But its justified to some extent at least. LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history. In computing the big ones are:
* creation of computers
* personal computers
* the Internet and world wide web
* LLMs
So the hype is at some level entirely warranted - its a revolutionary technology with real impact. As opposed to for example the hype around crypto or NFTs or blockchain or garbage like that.
chubot
If the personal computer counts, do mobile phones count?
I would certainly think so, except all those high quality sensors have been hindered by app stores and subpar apps, imo :-(
I would like to hear some uplifting stories about creative things people do with their phones, rather than consume media
Uehreka
Speaking as someone who just rebuked another commenter for daring to suggest Dijkstra’s algorithm should be on that list… yeah you may have a point. Mobile phones probably belong in the S-Tier with the Internet.
In 2012-2014 I lived in Thailand right as the Smartphone Wave was cresting. I saw people who had never owned a computer leapfrog laptops and get online for the first time (on their own terms) with a cheap smartphone. And sure, many of them just went straight to instagram, but also a generation of working class Thai nerds got access to Wikipedia at their leisure, and that has no doubt led to uncountable good things.
> I would like to hear some uplifting stories about creative things people do with their phones, rather than consume media
Ever since the iPhone X introduced infrared face tracking I’ve been using them in live theatre shows to drive digital characters. Here’s me and my friend Jordan playing 3 “AI Gods” during the Baltimore Rock Opera Society’s 2019 show Space Kumite using an iPhone X for facial motion capture: https://youtu.be/wSYWC1GCZA8?si=RtWDODFwHxEnaB9u
alganet
Miniaturization is a common trend.
Once modern computers appeared, smartphones became just a matter of time.
One could say that sucessful miniaturization is one of the tells that something is more likely to stick around.
chubot
Thank you, great example of creativity with a phone!
I used to download and play with the music apps, but I didn't like how the music was "stuck" there
chubot
I almost think deep learning and mobile phones had an analogous and surprising applicability
Deep learning failed to solve self-driving. In 2012 people said self driving would probably be ubiquitous by 2018, and it definitely would be by 2020
Instead we got chat bots in 2022 - that turned out to be the killer app, certainly the most widely adopted one
Likewise, instead of mobile phones being used as an aid in the physical world, they became the world
For example, the media they transmit seems to be how elections are won and lost now. It’s the device by which people form impressions of huge parts of the world
null
spoaceman7777
the majority of global internet users access the internet via a phone.
mcdeltat
Pretty arbitrary list, no? You could replace "LLMs" with various technologies that seem important (particularly at the beginning of their existence before their true value is determined). Why not: C, cloud computing, neural networks, Dijkstra's algorithm, WiFi, FFT, etc?
Uehreka
5 years after Dijkstra’s algorithm was invented, could non-tech people look back and see a huge impact on their everyday lives? No.
Of the things in your list, WiFi is the closest to rising to this level, but even WiFi can’t claim to be as big of a deal as the Internet (unless you’re being extremely cute).
Your list is all A- and B-Tier stuff. Definitely important, but not on the level of like, the personal computer. LLMs are likely on the S-Tier with the other things GP mentioned. Within a month of its release ChatGPT had 100 million users. Everyone in my life can tell me a way they’ve been affected by LLMs.
We can argue about whether LLMs are/will be good for humanity. We cannot argue about whether they’re a big deal, they are undeniable.
mcdeltat
You raise good points and I want to dig into it more.
One counterpoint is that LLMs are still young. I think it's preemptive to proclaim now that LLMs are world-changing when we really don't know how they will affect us in the future. For e.g. the internet, it's undeniable that it changed the world because now everything is so much more interconnected than it was 30 years ago. The internet has become a foundational element of technology. Will LLMs do the same? Surely we don't know.
Second counterpoint: "everyone in my life can tell me a way they've been affected by LLMs". Can they? How are they affected, for real? Everyone is certainly talking about them, does that necessarily mean the impact is large? Honestly for me life is basically the same and I'm a developer! Still go to the same job, SDLC is largely the same, my hobbies are the same, eat the same food, etc. The important day to day is the same. Except that I code a little faster, have a fancier search / problem solving tool, and every now and then I see a crappy AI gen image. Compare to e.g. the internet which has undoubtably changed day to day by drastically reducing physical interaction between people and systems.
latexr
Smartphones deserve to be on that list as a technology which fundamentally affected the way we interact, and once you realise that you also understand how important WiFi is.
tedunangst
I'd say it was closer to 25 years from the invention of the personal computer to the point it made an impact on everyday life.
alganet
wifi is radio though
SecretDreams
You could replace LLMs with Excel. Shit, even today, people are probably just using LLMs to populate excel sheets for consumption later lol.
null
wewewedxfgdf
Its a matter of opinion who cares what I think - if your list includes those things as fundamental changes that redefined society and technology then that's valid.
All I am saying is that LLMs are amongst the most revolutionary changes that break new ground and completely change the world - in my personal opinion.
TheOtherHobbes
LLMs could be one of the most revolutionary changes. The problem is that LLMs as a phenomenon are mostly wishful thinking and an acceptance of downgraded quality and reliability.
Sometimes they do useful things. But the gap between "sometimes" and "reliably" is not trivial.
It's honestly rather culty. I can see the hope that mistakes in today's vibe coding will be fixed by future vibe coding, which will be better in every way.
But it's not a given that's going to happen. Not on the evidence so far.
mcdeltat
Yeah I guess my point was there's a lot of opinion involved, especially at the moment. Which can play into the hype cycle. Full disclaimer I am an LLM semi-doubter so of course my opinion skews in that direction. We should see what the future evidence shows for the value of LLMs. Part of what the article touched on is historically the evidence often doesn't back up the hype, hence their disappointment.
jcranmer
LLMs are at this point almost 8 years old (dating from the Attention is All You Need paper). If it's truly a revolutionary technology, you should be able to point me to a company leveraging LLMs to make absolute bank, leaving all of its non-LLM-based competitors in the dust.
But instead, what I see in this thread in defense of the revolutionary ideals of LLMs, is how good future LLMs are going to be. That's not a sign of a revolutionary technology, that's a sign of hype. If you want to convince me otherwise, point to how good they are right now.
og_kalu
Large Language Models are not 8 years old. GPT-3 or arguably GPT-2 is the first LLM.
Moreover, I can think of 0 revolutionary technologies that did what you've said in such timelines. The Internet, Smartphones, The Steam Engine - the idea that revolutionary technology is created and everything changes in an instant is bizarre fiction.
And how well would you know really? Not everyone using LLMs internally is screaming about it from the rooftops.
jcranmer
Steam locomotives: the first practical steam locomotive was Stephenson's Rocket in 1829, although maybe you want count from the earlier locomotive developed for the Stockington and Darlington in 1825. In either case, by 1830, there was already a successful company producing steam locomotives, and everyone pursing the building of railroads were using or imminently planning to convert to using steam locomotives for tractive power.
Naval technology can be even more stark. HMS Dreadnought was a revolution in terms of battleship design; all the major naval countries were building dreadnoughts before she was completed (actually, a few started before she was even laid down!).
That's a feature you see a lot of revolutionary technologies experience: even the earliest incarnations have enough "wow" factor to push people to using them and improving from the get-go.
tptacek
I don't know who's making money with it, but are you using Google search more than you're using an LLM at this point? Most people I talk to aren't.
alganet
* creation of computers
* personal computers
* the Internet and world wide web
Full stop.
There, I fixed the list in a way that will stand the test of time.
Zambyte
Just because you don't like LLMs doesn't make them not revolutionary with regards to how people use computers.
alganet
I like LLMs, I am rooting for them.
They will be revolutionary and join the list once the technology stands the test of time.
There you go. A simple test that cannot be rushed by more datacenters.
kylecazar
Agreed, but it's also so very relative.
If nobody was paying attention to what the foundational companies have been doing for the past few years, I'm pretty sure I'd be a wild advocate singing their praises on these and other forums.
But since everyone is extremely into it, I just kind of watch and try to measure my expectations.
hcarvalhoalves
> LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history.
See, that’s what the article is about.
Saying LLM is on the same level of steam power, the computer, the internet, airplanes, etc. when the technology hasn’t even been around enough to have real impact, and all I read is extrapolation about how everything will be based on it “in the future” — that’s the definition of hype.
kadushka
LLMs do about half of my work for me. Today I spent most of my time interacting with o3 and 2.5-pro and I have accomplished what would take me 3 days to accomplish in the past. That’s real impact.
hcarvalhoalves
LLMs can’t do anything for my work besides being an alternative to Google, and even then I need to double check on another source.
You get a lot of positive reinforcement from positive opinions online, but the people who don’t depend on this to work won’t be vocal about it.
zusammen
What makes LLMs especially impressive is how skillfully they read text. That’s more interesting than text generation, since a lot of writing is formulaic and since they do not do the non-formulaic writing well at all. But I don’t think anyone truly knows why they are so adept at reading text.
pyfon
Missing from the list is the daily march of improved silicon performance through 50+ years.
egypturnash
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI.
I envy being able to write a statement like this without mentioning The Blockchain.
romanhn
The Cloud has joined The Information Superhighway as boring, foundational technology. Blockchain started out as hype and is still hype. AI/LLMs already provide infinitely more value than blockchain (which, to be fair, remains close to zero).
ClumsyPilot
Blockchain provides more utility to people living in sanctioned countries, countries with unstable currencies and to criminals than AI ever could.
kylecazar
I typically disagree with the practice of hating things just because they are trending, this is the stuff hipsters are made of.
But, there is a such thing as negative hype. A seller of AI models telling the world he's not hiring engineers anymore (and they too can cut their workforce) because his models are that good would be negative hype.
Animats
It's not as bad as battery hype.
Remember all those articles about some minor advance in surface chemistry which was then hyped into Trillion Dollar Industry Real Soon Now? They usually appeared in one of Nature's off-brand journals, or just arxiv, not in Chemical Engineering News or IEEE Trans. on Power Engineering. Such articles usually lacked the usual performance numbers (Wh/L, Wh/Kg, and Wh/$).
Then there's Javascript framework hype, which makes everyone run very hard to stay in the same place.
AI is at least making rapid progress. It's been less than three years since ChatGPT came out. Having lived and worked through the "AI Winter" (1984-2005), this is an improvement. The main problem now remains "hallucinations", or worse, "agentic" systems which act on hallucinations.
sethops1
I've learned to treat AI hype the same way I think about sports. Just ignore it. Sure I can name the popular models of the day in the same way I can name the Dallas Cowboys, but none of it matters and none of it affects me.
sreekanth850
>Nobody wants to talk to an AI when they need support. We all HATE that! It is bad enough that when you need service and support you end up talking to someone on the other side of the planet who's using some kind of answer sheet with absolutely no clue on how to really help you. This is true from my personal experience. Had switched my fiber provider because, with my previous provider, i was never able to talk to a human.
What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes.
> It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that it resembles the fashion industry.
Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?
Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented".
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. ... 10% of the AI hype is based on useful facts
The author ascribes malice to people who disagree with them about the use of AI. The author says proponents of AI are "greedy", "careless", unskilled, inexperienced, and unproductive. How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential?
Don't waste your time on this article. I wish I hadn't. Go build something, or at least make thoughtful, well defined critiques of the world.