The crowd is always wrong on these things. Just like everyone "knew" we were going into a deep recession sometime in late 2022, early 2023. The crowd has an incredibly short memory too.
What it means is that people are really cautious about AI. That is not a self reinforcing, fear of missing out, explosive process bubble. That is a classic bull market climbing a wall of worry.
Current models excel because of the corpus of the open internet they (stole from) built off of. New languages aren't likely to see as consistent results as old ones simply because these pattern matchers are trained on past history and not new information (see Rust vs C). I think the fact nobody's minting billions turning LLMs into trading bots should be pretty telling in that regard, since finance is a blend of relying on old data for models and intuiting new patterns from fresh data - in other words, directly targeting the weak points of LLMs specifically (inability to adapt to real-time data streams over the long haul).
AI's not going away, and I don't think even the doomiest of AI doomers is claiming or hoping for that. Rather, we're at a crossroads like you say: stakeholders want more money and higher returns (which AI promises), while the people doing the actual work are trying to highlight that internal strife and politics are the holdups, not a lack of brute-force AI. Meanwhile both sides are trying to rattle the proverbial prison bars over the threats to employment real AI will pose (and the threats current LLMs pose to society writ large), but the booster side's actions (e.g., donating to far-right candidates that oppose the very social reforms AI CEOs claim are needed) betray their real motives: more money, less workers, more power.
Is this the consensus on nomenclature? I though "AI doomers" was people thinking some dystopia will come out of it due to it. In that case I've read so much text wrong.
I’m worried that the US knowledge industries jumped the shark in the teens and have been living off hopeful investors assuming the next equivalent of the SaaS revolution is right around the corner, and AI for whatever reason just won’t change things that much, or if it does, the US tech industry will fumble it, assuming their resources and reputations will insulate them from the competition, just like the tech giants of the 90s vs Internet startups. If that’s true, some industries like biotech will still do fine, but the trajectory of the tech sector, generally, will start looking like that of the manufacturing sector in the 90s.