If you always say that every new fad is just hype, then you'll even be right 99.9% of the time. But if you want to be more valuable than a rock (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...), then you need to dig into the object-level facts and form an opinion.
In my opinion, AI has a much higher likelihood of changing everything very quickly than crypto or similar technologies ever did.
If you want to convince skeptics talk about examples, vibe code a successful business, show off your success with using AI. Telling people it's the future and if you disagree you have your head in the sand, is wholly unconvincing.
Don't people and companies using AI lazily to put out low quality content blind you to its potential as well as the reality of what it can do right now. Look at Google's VO3, most people in the world right now won't be able to tell you that it's AI generated and not real.
This doesn't feel like that. The applications of generative AI have become self-evident to anyone that's followed their rise. Specific applications of AI resemble snake oil, and there are hucksters who pivoted from crypto to AI, but the ratio of legit use cases to scams isn't even close.
If anything, the incentives for embellishment have flipped since crypto. VC-funded AI companies will dreamily fire press releases about AI taking us to Mars, but it doesn't have the pseudo-grassroots quality of cryptocurrency hype. The average worker is incentivized to be an AI skeptic. The rise of generative AI threatens workers in several fields today, and has already negatively impacted copywriters and freelance artists. I absolutely understand why people in those fields would respond by calling AI use unethical and criticize the shortcomings of today's models.
We'll see what the next few years hold. But personally, I foresee AI integration ramping up. Even if the models themselves completely stagnate from this point on, there's a lot of missing glue between the models and the real world.
They can’t write me a safety-critical video player meeting the spec with full test coverage using a proprietary signal that my customer would accept.
I don't need to convince anyone that LLMs are enabling me to do a lot more. This is what makes this hype different. It has bones. Once you've found a way to leverage it, it's undeniably helpful regardless of your prior disposition. Everyone else can say they're not useful and it rings hollow because it obviously is to me. And thus probably useful to everyone else too.