Is AI a bubble? People are saying yes. The catch? They’re not wrong.
But, that’s not all. It’s also a very fast growing market. Investors, business owners, and even US’s Department of War know that AI is here to stay (btw, you should read that post, it’s crazy).
The impacts of it are already and will keep growing, faster than you’ve seen any other technology.
The real question ends up being, how are people going to use it.
What interests me about AI is how it can help change people’s lives. It’s not about empowerment – it’s about emancipation. - @ian_batterbee
We should all be striving to make people’s lives better. This is the only way we’ll end up taking the non-damning path; the one where Skynet doesn’t take over, where the AI from iRobot doesn’t go crazy in an attempt to control the world.
There’s so many things now that I want to learn and do, with the barriers down on the access to skills. I want all of the ideas that I had in the past to come to life- where before, that wasn’t even possible. Now, I can take more steps forward. I can push out a quick prototype for a product idea in a few minutes. I can create a small working version of a video game in a few days vs the months and even years that it would have taken me beforehand.
I would look at it like this: What can I do now that I couldn’t before with AI?
Start looking into what people are doing today. There’s some really crazy stuff out there.
When a bubble bursts, it no longer exists, so I think of this more as a wave thats going to crash.
In my personal life, there are some clear examples of AI tools that will stay, and others that will go away. I now use the Google AI summary all the time for facts and general knowledge, love not having to scroll down into the search results, but I probably won’t ever touch the AI grocery helper that Safeway offers every time I open the app.
Love how @EricZ described it yesterday: AI is really useful for handling the “f*ck you work”. However, I think that more nebulous tasks that require individual decision making and intuition won’t last in the AI market.
It goes back to the judgement piece of things. AI will never (never say never) have the judgement that comes with lived experience and whatnot. I love it for producing new ideas or exposing edge cases, but at the end of the day, its not valuable without a humans ability to agree or disagree with it.
@ben what was it called? AI psychosis… that’s what we want to avoid LOL
AI will develop a different kind of lived experience. In some ways, that may be even more valuable than our own synthesis. It can see the constant iteration and the choices you make across five prompts.
That feedback loop matters.
It does not just see your intent. It also sees the different paths you try in order to get a better result.
It’s only a matter of time. The economic incentives to build these tools far outweigh the desire to preserve intuition-based work for individual survival. Some will win, some will lose. That’s the bubble part.
People are generally complacent, letting tools “streamline their work” instead of using them to create multiples of value. That’s going to be a problem for many.
It certainly is a bubble, but that doesn’t mean it’s without merit. We’re dealing with the hype and inflated market expectations of the new product. When the .com bubble burst around 2000, weight shifted and things re-oriented.
Right now, corporate giants are mis-applying the technology, creating low-value implementations that are damaging their business (looking at you Salesforce). We’ll continue to see this.
We’re also seeing this huge investment in the data-center infrastructure, with number that are more like funny-math than impressive projects.
The question remains: how do we best safely and effectively leverage AI? There’s a lot for us to influence and build!
I agree with this framing… Every new wave of technology goes through a hype cycle before it “lands,” ya know? I think the question I see is how are teams using AI intentionally….
I think we’re hearing “create faster” “increase outputs” “more efficiency” but we won’t see the actual effects until down the line on if this is truly happening in a way thats valuable at an organizational level. There is a ton of room for us to create impact vs speed up things that create noise.
I haven’t been within a hype cycle before, especially within tech. I’m curious from some of the our veteran tech people (e.g.: @EricZ, @Bryan, @ian_batterbee), was this hype cycle the largest that we’ve ever seen? My hunch is yes.
@ben certainly true for me. I was young for ‘the internet’ and ‘ecommerce’, so hard to judge there. Smartphones, QR codes, the Cloud, and digital magazines were all phase and phase-shifts that came, some of the left, but nothing as big as the AI push.