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Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

Crypto was exciting too. And metaverse. And VR. And voice assistants. Et cetera and so forth.

All those things would change the world, and nothing would ever be the same, and would disrupt everything. Except they wouldn't and they didn't.

The scam is that those companies don't want to be seen as mature companies, they need to justify valuations of growth companies, forever. So something must always go into the hype pyre.

By all means, I hope the scam goes on for longer, as it indirectly benefits me too. But I don't have it in my heart to be a hypocrite. I will call a pig a pig.

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I think AI isn’t the same as crypto or metaverse.

The LLMs and image generation models have obvious utility. They’re not AGI or anything wild like that, but they are legitimately useful, unlike crypto.

VR didn’t fail, it just wasn’t viral. Current VR platforms are still young. The internet commercially failed in 2001, but look at it now.

Crypto the industry, imo, is a big pyramid scheme. The technology has some interesting properties, but the industry is scammy for sure.

Metaverse wasn’t even an industry, it was a buzzword for MMOs during a time when everyone was locked at home. Not really interesting.

I don’t think it’s wise to lump every market boom together. Not everything is a scam.

People are losing jobs because of AI. Like it or not, as imperfect as AI may be, AI is having a real world disruptive impact, however negative it may be. Customer service teams and call centers are already being affected by AI, and if they aren't being smart about it, being rendered obsolete.

A lot of folks here seem to look at AI through examples of YC companies apparently. Step back and look instead at the kind of projects technology consultancies are taking up instead - they are real world examples of AI applications, many of which don't even involve LLMs but other aspects such as TTS/STT, image generation, transcription, video editing, etc. Way too many freelancers have begun complaining about how their pipelines have been zilch in the past two years.

There are also a lot of macroeconomic changes making hiring contractors (or anyone, really) a less attractive option at least in the US.

That was, perhaps, the only good retort made so far. Yes, call centers and customer service is being affected, although it is unclear to me if the cost-benefit make sense when AI stops being heavily subsidized - I may be wrong, but my impression is that AI companies bleed money not only with training, but in running the models, and the actual cost of those services for it to make sense will need to be substantially higher than they are right now.

Price dropping is just a matter of time. Compute gets cheaper and the models get better. We’ve seen 100x drop in price for same capabilities in ~2 years.

Don’t forget about writers and designers losing jobs as well. If you’re not absolute top and don’t use AI, AI will replace you.

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