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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

> It's so weird. I don't know what it is about AI that causes people to throw all thought and caution to the wind and charge forward blind. Its like they've been chomping at the bit for decades to get rid of those pesky humans and are so hyped up over it they can't see clearly anymore.

It's just a hype cycle. In my 15 years in data, I've seen around 3-4. Every time leadership get way too invested in the possibilities, and they waste tons of money on doomed efforts. A good example of the prior one was "Big Data" which was even more pointless than the current AI boom.

Don't get me wrong, there is valuable tech there (at the very least, being able to reliably generate structured data from unstructured input is incredibly valuable in data), but the current hype is way off the charts.

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AI is particularly infectious among C suites, because AI is great at spewing words. A substantial portion of folks in those positions are there because of family connections, existing wealth, etc., and their only contribution to the business is similarly spewing words. They went to good colleges where they excelled at spewing words. They worked cushy / hard jobs where they had to spew the just the right normal predictable words for this context, perhaps at a large volume and with little notice... and the words were hard words... not known to those outside the industry.

For those that lack initiative, strategy, a real understanding of their business, engineering, etc., the spewing words is the whole thing. It overshadows their entire understanding.

I think you are misleading people by calling it a "hype cycle". There is no going back from this technology. It is going to encroach every part of lives more and more.

What does hype even mean concretely? I think this is just a coping mechanism if you ask me.

Hype cycle doesn’t imply the technology has no value. But we should be able to talk about it as the boring, nerdy technology it is without that whole doom trolling and “AI will literally solve everything”

> the boring, nerdy technology it is

Er, what? Intricacies of a transformer pipeline might be boring and nerdy, but the results are not. BTW, I've yet to find any strong argument on why the current ML approaches are bounded below the level you find appropriate to be bored.

“Hype Cycle” is a Gartner term of art, which they use to describe the way waves of technological innovation penetrate the business world:

https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...

The idea is there’s a rush of irrational exuberance when an “innovation trigger” makes a new toy looks promising, and everybody rushes to use it for everything, regardless of whether its suitability-for-purpose is proven. Inevitably many of those pioneers find that it’s not good for their particular problems after all; usage reaches a “peak of inflated expectations,” and crashes into a “trough of disillusionment.”

Then the tech enters a quieter and more gradual “slope of enlightenment” as people work out use cases where the tech actually adds value; then adoption reaches a “plateau of productivity.”

Worth a glance at the way they map this to prior waves of technological exuberance.

Motte and Bailey.

From your video, it looks like your definition of hype involves a situation where eventual adoption increases above what is in the hype today.

Here's what the parent comment thinks:

> It's just a hype cycle. In my 15 years in data, I've seen around 3-4. Every time leadership get way too invested in the possibilities, and they waste tons of money on doomed efforts. A good example of the prior one was "Big Data" which was even more pointless than the current AI boom.

Obviously the parent doesn't think of hype the way you think of it because they claim that big data was pointless -- they don't see the eventual "slope of enlightenment". They think of hype cycle in the colloquial way and I was responding to that.

I see this all the time in the website and frankly the patronising "but actually hype means something else" is pointless and pedantic. I urge you to respond to words within the context and not bringing in academic definitions.

I'll thank you to not put words in my mouth ;).

I think the tech is useful, but the hype is ridiculous so I expect lots of companies to have large share price declines et al when this settles.

Big data also had a good core, but all the e-commerce sites building a data lake wasted lots of money.

The person I replied to put words in your mouth. You and I agree what you meant. You mean that the hype would die down and won’t come back up again. Ever. So reply to the person above who thinks you mean hype this way.

Whoops. Apologies, bad sleep last night and replied in wrong thread

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