Likewise when breathless reporters keep asking non-AI companies what their AI strategy is, you know you're firmly in step 2. Remember when Walmart was expected to have a "metaverse strategy"?
Also worth noting that many (most?) technologies do not have a step 4 or 5. They're just permanently/indefinitely dead after the hype train goes off the rails (see: personal jetpacks)
Crypto and AI both attract get rich quick bullshitters but I think AI right now is actually a crazy unexpected sci fi tech while crypto wasn't good for anything except fraud, gambling and the black market.
we need to drawn more disctint lines.
Or in other words, we already have flying cars - but the form of a flying car that's compatible with reality is called a helicopter, and piloting one comes with a fuck ton of expensive hoops to jump through.
That's the overall problem with all the cool sci-fi tech - it's cool in an action movie, when the protagonists are the only ones who get to use it. It stops being cool and becomes either useless or dangerous, once every rando gets to use it in their daily lives.
Car crash detection, automatic photo editing, heart rate sensing, etc. We use this stuff daily but there's generally little hype about the underlying tech (though some hype about specific applications).
What's in step 2 is "Generative AI", which IMO is also a misnomer for "large language models". The viability and uses of these models is far from proven out yet.
Oh yeah, imagine a transportation technology that killed people every week. No way that would be legal. Except if it's cars, for some reason they magically get a pass.
> Or in other words, we already have flying cars - but the form of a flying car that's compatible with reality is called a helicopter, and piloting one comes with a fuck ton of expensive hoops to jump through.
We could get rid of those hoops and flying cars would still have a lower death rate than the regular kind. But they can't replicate the "our oopsies are someone else's problem" field that cars have. That's the hard part.
Imagine a transportation technology that killed orders of magnitude more of people every week. That's the reality if you just magically s/car/jetpack/g for everyone.
> We could get rid of those hoops and flying cars would still have a lower death rate than the regular kind.
Not really. Driving a car is trivial compared to flying a helicopter; the hoops in question are mostly about ensuring pilots are properly trained (vs. half-ass bullshit trained, "you'll learn the real thing on the road" that is getting a driver's license) and actually meet some health standards. Number and difficulty of hoops differ in various areas of aviation, but they all recognize just how much easier it is to kill yourself with an aircraft, and how much more death and destruction an aircraft can cause.
I also agree that there's something there there with LLMs... but also that it's hopelessly overhyped right now.
Smartphones are a good example of this - nowadays we tend to think about iPhone or BlackBerry as the start of the smartphone "era" - but that wasn't the actual start of smartphones.
The first smartphones were called PDAs, and there was a hype cycle around that! Lots of companies wanted in! But adoption was abysmal and the whole thing fizzled out. BlackBerry and iPhone were the steps 4-5 of that cycle.
The state of LLMs right now is the Palm Pilot. Whiz-bang. Cool. Tons of press. Lots of imagined applications and attempts at mainstream adoption - but honestly nowhere near good enough to achieve mainstream breakout. Died a slow death without fulfilling its most lofty promises, and the space was relegated to a niche status until the actual entrants arrived to actually achieve mainstream success.
I think LLMs will have a step 4-5 with actual mainstream success. I just don't think the current players are it, and also that the vast majority of the current players have no pants on and are just pure grift.
They are certainly impressive, but their utility-to-hype/gimmick ratio is incredibly low right now, which could cause a crash. The greater the disappointment the greater the crash.
I'm reminded of 3D TVs. Remember those? Avatar came out in 2009. By 2016 the trend was dead. Despite the cries of "this time it's different." Of course, that time it was not different. The tech was impressive. Much more than the previous time the fad was around in the '80s. Remember the blue/red glasses? Absolutely not a single person talks about 3D TV today.
The 3D TV was a technical success but it was too much of a gimmick that it died out. My Facebook feed is a never-ending stream of AI generated garbage. I think people are going to tire of it, realize the images it makes are about as goofy as a 2004 MySpace page, and maybe it will stick around to fill out the useless corporate email and document bureaucracy and boilerplate framework code monkey BS.
But ChatGPT isn't writing Breaking Bad or The Sopranos anytime soon.
Where is the problem: those people who don't have this risk affinity don't need to buy/use a jetpack. Similarly, not everybody should go ice climbing or BASE jumping. Thus I see no reason to outlaw jetpacks just because of their danger.
Yeah, even with a bunch of safety features... Well, this Mitchell & Webb skit sums up the human-factor. [0]