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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

Tech customers are massively AI hype fatigued at this point.

The tech isn’t going away, but a hard reset is overdue to bring things back down for a cold hard reality check. Article yesterday about MSFT slashing quotas on AI sales as customers aren’t buying is in line with this broader theme.

Morgan Stanley also quietly trying to offload its exposure to data center financing in a move that smells very summer of 2008-ish. CNBC now talks about the AI bubble multiple times a day. OpenAI looks incredibly vulnerable and financially over-extended.

I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point.

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> AI hype fatigue

I think your wording is the correct wording, not the "AI fatigue" because I don't want to go to pre-AI era and I can't stand another "OMG It's over" tweet at the same time.

Yeah. Hype fatigue is a good description. Every time I see them talking about having AI book flights and hotels I think about the digital assistants on phones. Didn't they promise us the same thing back then?

I won't believe any of the claims until I see them working (flawlessly).

> I don’t want a hard bubble pop such that it nukes the tech ecosystem, but we’re reaching a breaking point.

Some days I wonder if we'd be better off or worse off if we had a complete collapse of technology. I think it'd be painful with a massive drop in standard of living, but we could still recover. I wonder if the same will be true in a couple more generations.

I think it's dangerous to treat younger generations like replaceable cogs. What happens when there's no one around that knows how the cogs are supposed to fit together?

Yup. The tech giants surely know the correction is coming by now. They are just trying to milk it just a tiny bit longer before it all comes crashing down.

Keep your eyes out on the skies, I forecast executives in golden parachutes in the near future

Yes. IPO talks suggests there will be rushed attempts to cash out before this all implodes, but all signs are pointing to that ship having sailed.

I don’t see any big AI company having a successful IPO anytime soon which is going to leave some folks stuck holding the financial equivalent of nuclear waste.

hey, at least this time it'll be venture capitalists and not pensioners.

Aren't the VCs getting some of their money from pensions?

The annoying part is that every tech company made an internal mandate for every team to stuff AI into every product. There are some great products that use AI (Claude Code, ChatGPT, Nano-banana, etc). But we simply haven't had time to come up with good ways of integrating AI into every software product. So instead every big tech company spent two years forcing AI into everything with minimal thought. Obviously people are not happy with this.

Some AI was done tastefully. Apple Photos search comes to mind. I can search for objects across your photos, and it does a reasonable job finding what I want. It's an example of AI that's so well done, the end user doesn't even know it's there.

Now Microsoft pushing "Copilot" is the complete opposite. It's so badly integrated with any standard workflow, it's disruptive in the worst of ways.

Google's photo app had the searching for years. It seemed a lot more useful a few years ago when it was using dumber image recognition models. Now it returns fewer matches on the same search. I tend to search the same things a few times a year as a supplement to some story and it's been frustrating to see in real time, a picture that used to come up when searching "car" or "guitar" is missing and instead unrelated pictures returned.

That's fair, but my point was that AI should be implemented in a way that's out-of-the-way but is still helpful to users.

I think LLMs are incredible, I think there's a lot of really good usecases where it can help promote recommendations and actions for a user to take. I don't think every user wants to have every app they touch into a Chatbot though.

It's not just that they are adding AI to every single product, it's being pushed on customers in incredibly intrusive and irritating ways that makes it seem as though they're desperate for their AI investments to pan out. If your AI productivity enhancement stuff is so amazing, shouldn't you be turning away customers at the door due to demand instead of brow beating me into finally signing up for it in submission?

This is what gets me with the AI promotion. If it's so good at increasing productivity, then where's all the result? Currently, we still have shitty software, updates that break things (Windows password icon?) and zero day threats.

How about tech companies focus on the actual problems first rather than desperately grabbing attention for a product that doesn't seem to deliver anything useful and instead hallucinates and regurgitates falsehoods. It's the opposite of a benefit and we're burning up the planet to make ourselves worse off.

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