Posted by 0nce 8 hours ago
Social media has also gone utterly crazy. The last time I saw a gaslighting operation on this scale and volume (including accounts who "hate" AI "because its so scary good") was during the start of the Gaza war.
These accounts becoming easier to distinguish too, because whether they boost AI or feign criticism they all categorically refuse to use the s word.
I guess there is a few trillion riding on perpetuating this mass psychosis so it makes sense they'd try to use every trick to keep it going as long as possible.
Internet bubble was nothing like this. The scale is greater, the promises are more insane and the pop is going to be much more devastating.
And lawyers, and doctors, and tax preparers, and financial managers...
We also realized that a project we thought was going to involve thousands of man-hours of very expensive, senior draftsperson labor to backport a feature into decades of CAD files we could, after years of procrastination, just forget! AI has got to the point where it can see and count what we need for us with greater accuracy, in our tests, than our very best humans, so we can just make the change going forward and let AI read the old files as needed.
There's incremental commercial adoption of that nature that I'm sure is happening slowly across the corporate spectrum, and that kind of thing is durable demand, not a bubble.
Note though that I'm talking about real revenue, etc. Not stock market bubbles. The feds been inflating that junk since the housing bust. We'll all pay for that eventually.
I did a bunch of that type of work pre covid. IME it's usually an hour to build and about 3-5 weeks to handle bureaucracy, data cleaning and detective work to account for the lack of docs. AI would probably handle that 1 hour's worth of work OK but using it for the rest of that work would be a shortcut to hallucination town, especially when the context is something you have to dig up by actually talking to people.
Also it's the only bit of that job that isnt mind numbing.
There's an enormous number of projects all over the economy these days which are being presented as an enormous "AI win" where the benefits were dubious at best, because it's become a clear route to career advancement.
I'm equally certain that it has its niches but ~80% of where I'm seeing it used it's either smoke and mirrors or creating more problems than it is solving.
strike?