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What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discus

by sqs 1y ago

What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes. > It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that it resembles the fashion industry. Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented". > In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. ... 10% of the AI hype is based on useful facts The author ascribes malice to people who disagree with them about the use of AI. The author says proponents of AI are "greedy", "careless", unskilled, inexperienced, and unproductive. How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential? Don't waste your time on this article. I wish I hadn't. Go build something, or at least make thoughtful, well defined critiques of the world.

ninetyninenine 1y ago
It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad. AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage. I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two years when a rudimentary version of it is finally realized. What especially pisses me off is the know it all tone, like they knew all along it's garbage and that they're above it all. These people are tools with no opinions other then hype = bad and logic = nonexistent.
- jackphilson 1y ago
  Don't be mad about their opinions, be grateful for the arbitrage opportunity
  - ClumsyPilot 1y ago
    I like this approach, the challenge us that without a good grasp of finance it is really hard to leverage these opportunities
- latexr 1y ago
  > I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI It was never this level of AI. The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about. No one ever fantasised about AI which couldn’t accurately count the number of letters in a common word or that would give you provably wrong information in an assertive authoritative tone. No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything.
  - mjr00 1y ago
    > No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything. This has basically been why it's a non-starter in a lot of (most?) business applications. If your dishwasher failed to clean anything 20% of the time, would you rely on it? No, you'd just wash the dishes by hand, because you'd at least have a consistent result. That's been the result of AI experimentation I've seen: it works ~80% of the time, which sounds great... except there's surprisingly few tasks where a 20% fail rate is acceptable. Even "prompt engineering" your way to a 5% failure/inaccuracy rate is unacceptable for a fully automated solution. So now we're moving to workflows where AI generates stuff and a human double checks. Or the AI parses human text into a well-defined gRPC method with known behavior. Which can definitely be helpful, but is a far cry from the fantasized AI in sci-fi literature.
    - Nition 1y ago
      One type of question that a 20%-failure-rate AI can still be very useful for is ones that are hard to answer but easy to verify. For example say you have a complex medical problem. It can be difficult to do a direct Internet search that covers the history and symptoms. If you ask AI though, it'll be able to give you some ideas for specific things to search. They might be wrong answers, but now you can easily search specific conditions and check them. Sort of P vs. NP for questions.
      - skydhash 1y ago
        > For example say you have a complex medical problem. Or you go to a doctor instead of imagining answers.
- asdf12341 1y ago
  Yeah well this hype comes with a lot of financial investment, which means I get affected when the market crash. If people makes cool thing on their own money ( or just not consume as much of our total capital ), and it turns out not as affective as they would like, I would be nice to them.
  - gibbitz 1y ago
    Yeah the effectiveness of the hype on investment is more important than the effectiveness of the technology. AI isn't the product, the promise of the stock going up is. Buy while you can, the Emperor's New Clothes are getting threadbare.
- calmbell 1y ago
  Please find me someone with any background in technology who thinks AI is complete garbage (zero value or close to it). The author doesn't think so, they assert that "perhaps 10% of the AI hype is based upon useful facts" and "AI functions greatly as a "search engine" replacement". There is a big difference between thinking something is garbage and thinking something is a massive bubble (in the case of AI, this could be the technology is worth hundreds of billions rather than trillions).
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    Nobody is talking about a financial bubble. That's orthoganol. Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing. The blog post is talking about the hype in general and about AI in general. It is not just referring to the financial opportunity. You can use chatGPT for free. Does that mean it's total shit because openAI allowed you to use it for free? No. It's still freaking revolutionary.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      > Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing. Gull-wing doors on cars. Both awesome and flawed.
      - ninetyninenine 1y ago
        I was thinking more like oxygen. Amazing because without it you’re dead meat. But nobody gives a shit about it because it’s everywhere and free. That’s what LLMs are. They are everywhere and too readily accessible so people end up just complaining about too much hype.
- eschaton 1y ago
  Sounds like you bought the hype about LLMs without any understanding anything about LLMs and are now upset that the hype train is crashing because it was based on promises that not only wouldn’t but couldn’t be kept.
  - spiderice 1y ago
    > hype train is crashing According to who? Perhaps the people who aren't paying attention. People who use AI frequently and see the rate of progress are still quite hyped.
    - pesus 1y ago
      It makes sense that people who don't believe the (current wave of generative) AI hype aren't using it and those who do are.
      - kukkeliskuu 1y ago
        It is more probable that people who have used it more have a more realistic and balanced view of their capabilities, based on the experience. Unless their livelihood depends on not having a relalistic view of the capabilities.
YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today? This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025: https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518 https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518 Whence I quote: i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution Do you remember someone from the databases industry claiming that databases are going to be "like the renaissance" or lik the industrial revolution? Oracle? Microsoft? PostgreSQL? Here's another one with an excerpt of an interview with Demis Hssabis, dated April 17, 2025: https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/1912929020905206233 https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/1912929020905206233 Whence I quote: " I think maybe in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease." Nobel Prize Winner and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on how AI can revolutionize drug discovery doing "science at digital speed." Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"? Data centers? Computers in general? All disease?
- da_chicken 1y ago
  The last time I remember the hype being even remotely real was Web 2.0. And most of everything that made that hypeworthy is long gone (interoperability and open standards like RSS or free APIs) or turned out to be genuinely awful ("social media was a mistake") or has become far worse than what it replaced (SaaS).
- nl 1y ago
  Sure, databases didn't get as much hype but that's partly because they are old. Look at something more recent: "cloud", "social networking", "blockchain", "mobile". Plenty of hype! Some delivered, some didn't.
  - 1over137 1y ago
    AI is old too.
bestvibecoder 1y ago
[flagged]
tsecurity 1y ago
Agreed. “Hype is always bad” was where I had to stop. It could lead to good things. Most startups have hype.
grg0 1y ago
Some issues with this "hype": - Company hires tens of people to build an undefined problem. They have a solution (and even that is rather nebulous) and are looking for a problem to solve. - Company pushes the thing down your throat. The goal is not clear. They make authoritative-sounding statements on how it improves productivity, or throughput, or some other metric, only to retract later when you pull off those people into a private meeting. - People who claim what all the things that nebulous solution can accomplish when, in fact, nobody really knows because the thing is in a research phase. These are likely the "charlatans" OP is referring to, and s/he's not wrong. - Learning "next hot thing" instead of the principles that lead to it and, worse still, apply "next hot thing" in the wrong context when the trade-offs have reversed. My own example: writing a single-page web application with "next hot JS framework" when you haven't even understood the trade-off between client-side and server-side rendering (this is just my example, not OP's, but you can probably relate.) etc. etc. Perhaps the post isn't very well articulated, but it does make several points. If you haven't experienced any of the above, then you're just not in the kind of company that OP probably has worked at. But the things they describe are very real. I agree there is nothing wrong with "hype" per se, but the author is using the word in a very particular context.
Guthur 1y ago
There are issues with our current economic model and it blows down to rent. The service need model is allowing the owners and controllers of capital to set up systems that allow them to extract as much rent as possible, AI is just another approach to this. And then if it is successful for building, as you say we'll have yet another production issue as that building is essentially completely automatic. Read how over production has affect society for pretty much ever and then ask yourself will it really be good for the masses. Additionally all the media is so thoroughly captured that we're in "1984" yet so few people seem to realise it. The elites will start wars, crush people's livelihoods and brainwash everyone into being true believers as they march their sons to war while living in poverty.
jimmaswell 1y ago
Hype is good. Hype is the explosion of exploration that comes in the wake of something new and interesting. We wouldn't be on this website of no one was ever hyped about transistors or networking or programming languages. Myriad people tried myriad ideas each time, and most of them didn't pan out, but here we are with the ideas that stuck. An armchair-naysayer like the author declaring others fools for getting excited and putting in work to explore new ideas is the only true fool involved.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"Don't waste your time on this article." By telling others not to read something doesn't it just make them curious and want to read it even more. Do HN readers actually obey such commands issued by HN commenters.
mariusor 1y ago
It's sad to see such a terrible comment at the top of the discussion. You start with an ad-hominem against author assuming they want to "look smart" by writing negatively about hype, you construct a straw-man to try to make your point, and you barely touch on any of the points made by them, and when you do, you pick on the weakest one. Shame.
Mawr 1y ago
What a shallow, negative post. Can't believe you're implying that there's no outsized hype about AI. At least bring some arguments forth instead of asking silly hypothetical questions. > Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Well, dear gosh. You look at the objective qualities of the technology then compare it to what's being said about it. For stuff like AI, blockchain etc. the hype surrounding them is orders of magnitude greater than their utility. Less so for AI than the near-useless blockchain, but still disproportionate. AI has an obvious downside in its inability to ever be the source of truth. So then all you need to do is look for the companies using it as such, even for something as simple as phone support and you've got your hype-driven bone-headed decision making right there: [1] [2]. > Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented". Very clever wording, you can make "one of the most beneficial tools ever invented" fit basically anything with a little bit of spin. Make up your mind instead of inventing weasel statements. > How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential? Oh I'm sure most of them do. Does not contradict "greedy, careless, unskilled" in any way. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536860

by sqs 1y ago

ninetyninenine 1y ago

It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad. AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage. I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two years when a rudimentary version of it is finally realized. What especially pisses me off is the know it all tone, like they knew all along it's garbage and that they're above it all. These people are tools with no opinions other then hype = bad and logic = nonexistent.

jackphilson 1y ago
Don't be mad about their opinions, be grateful for the arbitrage opportunity
- ClumsyPilot 1y ago
  I like this approach, the challenge us that without a good grasp of finance it is really hard to leverage these opportunities
latexr 1y ago
> I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI It was never this level of AI. The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about. No one ever fantasised about AI which couldn’t accurately count the number of letters in a common word or that would give you provably wrong information in an assertive authoritative tone. No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything.
- mjr00 1y ago
  > No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything. This has basically been why it's a non-starter in a lot of (most?) business applications. If your dishwasher failed to clean anything 20% of the time, would you rely on it? No, you'd just wash the dishes by hand, because you'd at least have a consistent result. That's been the result of AI experimentation I've seen: it works ~80% of the time, which sounds great... except there's surprisingly few tasks where a 20% fail rate is acceptable. Even "prompt engineering" your way to a 5% failure/inaccuracy rate is unacceptable for a fully automated solution. So now we're moving to workflows where AI generates stuff and a human double checks. Or the AI parses human text into a well-defined gRPC method with known behavior. Which can definitely be helpful, but is a far cry from the fantasized AI in sci-fi literature.
  - Nition 1y ago
    One type of question that a 20%-failure-rate AI can still be very useful for is ones that are hard to answer but easy to verify. For example say you have a complex medical problem. It can be difficult to do a direct Internet search that covers the history and symptoms. If you ask AI though, it'll be able to give you some ideas for specific things to search. They might be wrong answers, but now you can easily search specific conditions and check them. Sort of P vs. NP for questions.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      > For example say you have a complex medical problem. Or you go to a doctor instead of imagining answers.
asdf12341 1y ago
Yeah well this hype comes with a lot of financial investment, which means I get affected when the market crash. If people makes cool thing on their own money ( or just not consume as much of our total capital ), and it turns out not as affective as they would like, I would be nice to them.
- gibbitz 1y ago
  Yeah the effectiveness of the hype on investment is more important than the effectiveness of the technology. AI isn't the product, the promise of the stock going up is. Buy while you can, the Emperor's New Clothes are getting threadbare.
calmbell 1y ago
Please find me someone with any background in technology who thinks AI is complete garbage (zero value or close to it). The author doesn't think so, they assert that "perhaps 10% of the AI hype is based upon useful facts" and "AI functions greatly as a "search engine" replacement". There is a big difference between thinking something is garbage and thinking something is a massive bubble (in the case of AI, this could be the technology is worth hundreds of billions rather than trillions).
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  Nobody is talking about a financial bubble. That's orthoganol. Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing. The blog post is talking about the hype in general and about AI in general. It is not just referring to the financial opportunity. You can use chatGPT for free. Does that mean it's total shit because openAI allowed you to use it for free? No. It's still freaking revolutionary.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    > Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing. Gull-wing doors on cars. Both awesome and flawed.
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      I was thinking more like oxygen. Amazing because without it you’re dead meat. But nobody gives a shit about it because it’s everywhere and free. That’s what LLMs are. They are everywhere and too readily accessible so people end up just complaining about too much hype.
eschaton 1y ago
Sounds like you bought the hype about LLMs without any understanding anything about LLMs and are now upset that the hype train is crashing because it was based on promises that not only wouldn’t but couldn’t be kept.
- spiderice 1y ago
  > hype train is crashing According to who? Perhaps the people who aren't paying attention. People who use AI frequently and see the rate of progress are still quite hyped.
  - pesus 1y ago
    It makes sense that people who don't believe the (current wave of generative) AI hype aren't using it and those who do are.
    - kukkeliskuu 1y ago
      It is more probable that people who have used it more have a more realistic and balanced view of their capabilities, based on the experience. Unless their livelihood depends on not having a relalistic view of the capabilities.

YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago

>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today? This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025: https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518 https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518 Whence I quote: i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution Do you remember someone from the databases industry claiming that databases are going to be "like the renaissance" or lik the industrial revolution? Oracle? Microsoft? PostgreSQL? Here's another one with an excerpt of an interview with Demis Hssabis, dated April 17, 2025: https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/1912929020905206233 https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/1912929020905206233 Whence I quote: " I think maybe in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease." Nobel Prize Winner and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on how AI can revolutionize drug discovery doing "science at digital speed." Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"? Data centers? Computers in general? All disease?

da_chicken 1y ago
The last time I remember the hype being even remotely real was Web 2.0. And most of everything that made that hypeworthy is long gone (interoperability and open standards like RSS or free APIs) or turned out to be genuinely awful ("social media was a mistake") or has become far worse than what it replaced (SaaS).
nl 1y ago
Sure, databases didn't get as much hype but that's partly because they are old. Look at something more recent: "cloud", "social networking", "blockchain", "mobile". Plenty of hype! Some delivered, some didn't.
- 1over137 1y ago
  AI is old too.

bestvibecoder 1y ago

[flagged]

tsecurity 1y ago

Agreed. “Hype is always bad” was where I had to stop. It could lead to good things. Most startups have hype.

grg0 1y ago

Some issues with this "hype": - Company hires tens of people to build an undefined problem. They have a solution (and even that is rather nebulous) and are looking for a problem to solve. - Company pushes the thing down your throat. The goal is not clear. They make authoritative-sounding statements on how it improves productivity, or throughput, or some other metric, only to retract later when you pull off those people into a private meeting. - People who claim what all the things that nebulous solution can accomplish when, in fact, nobody really knows because the thing is in a research phase. These are likely the "charlatans" OP is referring to, and s/he's not wrong. - Learning "next hot thing" instead of the principles that lead to it and, worse still, apply "next hot thing" in the wrong context when the trade-offs have reversed. My own example: writing a single-page web application with "next hot JS framework" when you haven't even understood the trade-off between client-side and server-side rendering (this is just my example, not OP's, but you can probably relate.) etc. etc. Perhaps the post isn't very well articulated, but it does make several points. If you haven't experienced any of the above, then you're just not in the kind of company that OP probably has worked at. But the things they describe are very real. I agree there is nothing wrong with "hype" per se, but the author is using the word in a very particular context.

Guthur 1y ago

There are issues with our current economic model and it blows down to rent. The service need model is allowing the owners and controllers of capital to set up systems that allow them to extract as much rent as possible, AI is just another approach to this. And then if it is successful for building, as you say we'll have yet another production issue as that building is essentially completely automatic. Read how over production has affect society for pretty much ever and then ask yourself will it really be good for the masses. Additionally all the media is so thoroughly captured that we're in "1984" yet so few people seem to realise it. The elites will start wars, crush people's livelihoods and brainwash everyone into being true believers as they march their sons to war while living in poverty.

jimmaswell 1y ago

Hype is good. Hype is the explosion of exploration that comes in the wake of something new and interesting. We wouldn't be on this website of no one was ever hyped about transistors or networking or programming languages. Myriad people tried myriad ideas each time, and most of them didn't pan out, but here we are with the ideas that stuck. An armchair-naysayer like the author declaring others fools for getting excited and putting in work to explore new ideas is the only true fool involved.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"Don't waste your time on this article." By telling others not to read something doesn't it just make them curious and want to read it even more. Do HN readers actually obey such commands issued by HN commenters.

mariusor 1y ago

It's sad to see such a terrible comment at the top of the discussion. You start with an ad-hominem against author assuming they want to "look smart" by writing negatively about hype, you construct a straw-man to try to make your point, and you barely touch on any of the points made by them, and when you do, you pick on the weakest one. Shame.

Mawr 1y ago

What a shallow, negative post. Can't believe you're implying that there's no outsized hype about AI. At least bring some arguments forth instead of asking silly hypothetical questions. > Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Well, dear gosh. You look at the objective qualities of the technology then compare it to what's being said about it. For stuff like AI, blockchain etc. the hype surrounding them is orders of magnitude greater than their utility. Less so for AI than the near-useless blockchain, but still disproportionate. AI has an obvious downside in its inability to ever be the source of truth. So then all you need to do is look for the companies using it as such, even for something as simple as phone support and you've got your hype-driven bone-headed decision making right there: [1] [2]. > Or, if the author would have considered those over-hyped at the time, then they should have some humility because in 10 years they may look back at AI as another one of the "most beneficial tools ever invented". Very clever wording, you can make "one of the most beneficial tools ever invented" fit basically anything with a little bit of spin. Make up your mind instead of inventing weasel statements. > How does the author know that these people don't believe that AI has great utility and potential? Oh I'm sure most of them do. Does not contradict "greedy, careless, unskilled" in any way. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43683012 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40536860