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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

I was just in a thread yesterday with someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was.

Everything about the conversation felt like talking to a true believer, and there's plenty out there.

It's the hopes and dreams of the Next Big Thing after blockchain and web3 fell apart and everyone is desperate to jump on the bandwagon because ZIRP is gone and everyone who is risk averse will only bet on what everyone else is betting on.

Thus, the cycle feeds itself until the bubble pops.

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Two things can be true:

1) We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible to do with existing AI technology. 2) Almost all of the money we are spending on AI now is ineffectual and wasted.

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If you go back to the late 1990s, that is the state that most companies were at with _computers_. Huge, wasteful projects that didn't improve productivity at all. It took 10 years of false starts sometimes to really get traction.

It's interesting to think Microsoft was around back then too, taking approximately 14 years to regain the loss of approximately 58% of their valuation.

I don't see how people don't see it. LLMs are a revolutionary technology and are for the first time since the iPhone are changing how we interact with computers. This isn't block chains. This is something we're going to use until something better replaces it.

I agree to some extent, but we’re also in a bubble. It seems completely obvious that huge revenue numbers aren’t around the corner, not enough to justify the spend.

> "someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was."

I think that. It's new technology and it always takes some years before all the implications and applications of new technology are fully worked out. I also think that we're in a bubble that will hose a lot of people when it pops.

All these boosters think we're on the leading edge of an exponential, when it's way more likely that we're on the midpoint to tail of a logistic

AI research has always been a series of occasional great leaps between slogs of iterative improvements, from Turing and Rosenblatt to AlexNet and GPT-3. The LLM era will result in a few things becoming invisible architecture* we stop appreciating and then the next big leap starts the hype cycle anew.

*Think toll booths (“exact change only!”) replaced by automated license plate readers in just the span of a decade. Hardly noticeable now.

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