Another Bubble
A not-so-hot take that the bubble is bursting. And also maybe that's OK.
Ryan Broderick, author of incredible newsletter Garbage Day (and co-host of the podcast Panic World) put out a really great little video comparing the causes of the Dot Com bubble to the ongoing AI bubble.
He makes a lot of great points, but I think a good summation would be something else he said recently:
The internet is infinite. So the Big Tech business model is focused on convincing you that it isn’t.
Meanwhile my good friend Richard sent me these two amazing articles.
I use agents at work and at home for things, I use chatbots sometimes to help me troubleshoot technical issues. I have developed a nose for when it tells me something that may be nonsense. I have not seen any evidence of it being able to replace producers, coders, artists, graphics designers, writers of any kind, etc, etc. It may be able to do parts of that work very quickly, but you still need folks who understand what the work is to actually use these tools in a professional setting.
Anyway, I completely agree with Ryan’s take, which is that while aspects of the tech is here to stay, the industry itself is kind of ridiculous. As Cory Doctorow has said, (I’m paraphrasing), what some scammers are calling “AI” in order to part investors with money, is just a family of technologies that’s been quietly evolving for years. Which is true! The same tech that drives ChatGPT also runs auto-subtitling and content-aware fill in Photoshop. This is a family of toys (chatbots) and plugins (narrow-purpose tools in existing, often properly-designed and -developed software).
Trying to build a world-changingly large industry around a family of products that’s neither good enough for businesses nor cheap enough for regular folks, when what we all probably actually need is a different bunch of tiny specialised models being orchestrated in a lightweight way on our laptops, or maybe some cheap compute providers if we need something in a hurry.
The whole thing is making me feel, honestly, optimistic. I know there will be carnage on a financial level, which means also on a human level, as a result of the crash. I’m not excited about that. But I also think that the end of these companies will be a good thing, and that the sooner we stop burning down the planet and overhyping what is a pretty normal technology, the better.