Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think AI is overhyped—am I missing something? I remember being skeptical of Dropbox and SpaceX but LLMs seem genuinely revolutionary. Yeah, it’s not “AI” as we understand it from the movies. But it can write papers better than a college freshman. That’s amazing.

View on HN

In this very thread people are discussing “superintelligence” being around the corner. So yes, it is overhyped. Like if I took the invention of a steam engine and said teleportation is coming tomorrow.

Of course the steam engine was revolutionary. That doesn’t excuse or legitimize the nonsense.

> I remember being skeptical of Dropbox and SpaceX but LLMs seem genuinely revolutionary

Dropbox or SpaceX wasn't valued at many trillions of dollars though. Just because its very useful doesn't mean it lives up to the biggest hype ever in human history in terms of monetary investment.

Well, most college freshmen aren't plagiarizing and inserting random falsehoods, while consuming an excess of electricity all at an artificially low cost.

College freshmen actually consume way more electricity than LLMs on the same task.

It's over hyped insofar you're looking at the current valuation of the AI companies and look at the value they actually produce at the end of the day.

AI is here to stay, and long term, it's likely going to revolutionize almost all parts of the job market. But to get there... I'm really not sure what a reasonable time estimate would be. I can see it take something like 3 years, which would make current evaluation plausible, but I wouldn't bet on it.

It'd bet on it taking a tad longer, but I strongly suspect by 10-20 yrs, we'll get there.

Under that time horizon, it feels overvalued and hyped, because the winner's of this revolution might not even have been founded yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com