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Comment by MrGilbert | Hacker News Reader

> It's like everyone's reading from the same script/playbook.

I'd assume that many CEO are driven by the same urge to please the board. And depending on your board, there might be people on it who spend many hours per week on LinkedIn, and see all the success stories around AI, maybe experienced something first hand.

Good news: It's, from my estimate, only a phase. Like when blockchain hit, and everyone wanted to be involved. This time - and that worries me - the ressources involved are more expensive, though. There might be a stronger incentive for people to "get their money back". I haven't thought about the implications yet.

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People say this a lot, please the board. But why would so many boards be hype-driven and CEO's be rational? It might just as well be the C-suite themselves who are the source of it.

The CEOs and execs also seem to be feeding and sustaining the hype themselves:

CEO1: "This technology is the biggest technical leap in my lifetime!"

CEO2: "Oh yea? Well, this technology is more useful than electricity!"

CEO3: "Oh yea?? This technology is more impactful than the invention of fire!"

VP1: "This technology is going to really help improve productivity!"

VP2: "Come on! This technology is going to let one person do the work of 100!"

VP3: "Surely you jest! Without using this technology, you might as well not even try to earn a living!"

It's not like blockchain. Blockchain legitimately made things slower and less useful for dubious benefits.

AI is more like the early web. There is definite value that people can see, but no one really knows how to monetize beyond the incredibly obvious 'sell people access to it', so everyone is throwing spaghetti at the wall waiting for it to stick. When someone gets it to stick, there will be a giant amount of money coming at them, but until then there will be a ton of people with sauce all over their faces looking like idiots.

Upvoted to save you from the negatives because I too am tired of seeing the comparison to blockchain. I'm not sure where it even comes from other than just being another recent hype train people remember, but blockchain settled into a relatively tiny niche. The most basic deployment of LLMs / AI by comparison is instantly, obviously more useful than that.

As soon as it starts returning to me factual, confirm-able answers consistently. Then I'll use it. I just had to fix something a co-worker fucked up by asking ai how to do it. The responses are so confidently wrong it's like watching Kash Patel tell me that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

> As soon as it starts returning to me factual, confirm-able answers consistently. Then I'll use it.

Humans don't behave this way. Yet, we still employ humans. AI is unreliable. We all agree. But that does not make it useless.

Ok, how about: Once AI is less overconfident than a median teammate, it may be worth something. It's not there yet.

I agree. Overconfidence and sycophancy is the real problem. This should be the focus of development energy. The models are already capable; now they need to be reliable.

That's why we introduced computers. If they aren't reliable anymore we can stop using them.

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