I mean that's every tech company.

I made a joke once after the first time I watched one of those Apple announcement shows in 2018, where I said "it's kind of sad, because there won't be any problems for us to solve because the iPhone XS Max is going to solve all of them".

The US economy is pretty much a big vibes-based Ponzi scheme now, so I don't think we can single-out AI, I think we have to blame the fact that the CEOs running these things face no negative consequences for lying or embellishing and they do get rewarded for it because it will often bump the stock price.

Is Tesla really worth more than every other car company combined in any kind of objective sense? I don't think so, I think people really like it when Elon lies to them about stuff that will come out "next year", and they feel no need to punish him economically.

"Ponzi" requires records fraud and is popularly misused, sort of like if people started describing every software bug as "a stack overflow."

I'd rather characterize it as extremes of Greater Fool Theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

I would argue it’s fraud-adjacent. These tech CEOs know that they’re not going to be able to keep the promises that they’re making. It’s dishonest at the very least, if it doesn’t legally constitute “fraud”.

I maintain that most anti-AI sentiment is actually anti-lying-tech-CEO sentiment misattributed.

The technology is neat, the people selling it are ghouls.

Exactly: the technology is useful but because the executive class is hyping it as close to AGI because their buddies are slavering for layoffs. If that “when do you get fired?” tone wasn’t behind the conversation, I think a lot of people would be interested in applying LLMs to the smaller subset of things they actually perform well at.

Maybe CEOs should face consequences for going on the stage and outwardly lying. Instead they're rewarded by a bump in stock price because people appear to have amnesia.

For me it's mostly about the subset of things that LLMs suck at but still rammed in everywhere because someone wants to make a quick buck.

I know it's good tech for some stuff, just not for everything. It's the same with previous bubbles. VR is really great for some things but we were never going to work with a headset on 8 hours a day. Bitcoin is pretty cool but we were never going to do our shopping list on Blockchain. I'm just so sick of hypes.

But I do think it's good tech, just like I enjoy VR daily I do have my local LLM servers (I'm pretty anti cloud so I avoid it unless I really need the power)

It's not really about the societal impacts for me, at least not yet, it's just not good enough for that yet. I do worry about that longer-term but not with the current generation of AI. At my work we've done extensive benchmarking (especially among enthusiastic early adopters) and while it can save a couple hours a week we're nowhere near the point where it can displace FTEs.

Yeah, I think those are coming from the same place: so many companies are trying to wedge LLMs into everything, especially contexts where you really need actual reasoning to accomplish a task, and it’s just such a “magic VC money fairy, pick us!” play that it distracts from the underlying tech opening up some text processing capabilities we would’ve thought were amazing a few years ago.

This is how I felt about Bitcoin.

I hate the Anthropic guy so much.. when I see the face it just brings back all the nonsense lies and "predictions" he says. Altman is kind of the same but for some reason Dario kind of takes the cake.