Ask Lemmy

Hype brings investment money to the table. When an emerging technology appears, you can say we are looking to develop those technologies into our existing products and you will see a bump up in your share price.

After a few years of failed products and the hype dies for the next thing you can never mention the old hype but keep the bump in share price.

Think about 5-7 years ago, Blockchain was all the hype, 5-7 before then was Machine Learning and XaaS, before that was Big Data.

My understanding is that a lot of venture capitalist funding is driven by gut feel and personal connection. Like, they'll tell you that they're the vanguard of the future with a vision, but most of the time they're just cliquey bros going "dude, sick" and burning money.

There's an anecdote in the book "the cold start problem" about how zoom got funding even though the guys funding it thought it was a solved problem, that a new video company wouldn't go anywhere, but the zoom guy was their bro so they gave him millions of dollars.

I feel like it's possible some future will look back at this the way we look at feudalism. Just like, that's such a bad system , why did people put up with it?

Suits heard about this secret sauce called AI that can cut down on the need for those pesky humans that are always looking for handouts and luxuries like a living wage and benefits. The consumer will have to accept it when the only choices they're offered are varying flavors of the same shit.

Attracts investors.

When people are evaluating companies, and see a company missing out on the current trend, how is that going to factor into their valuation of the stock prices?

It hypes investors. Investors are the customers.

Because the boss thinks it sounds cool and doesn't want to be the only kid in the block without an AI product to sell.

1. OpenAI struck gold, NVIDIA followed suit, and everyone else bought shovels hoping to get investors even though they have no plans on striking gold (developing useful AI).

2. Would you like to buy a timeshare to the moon? If we all buy, you'll be able to sell your spot for 10x the price! Don't wait! Spots are limited!

Money was already spent. The hype companies were backed by big capital in their early days. Now the people who provided that capital want to cash out and they want their winnings. So you will have AI shoved down your throat on every piece of media channel those people also own. AI is a hype term that appears periodically since before the 2000s. This is nothing new. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

LLMs are toys that sparkle for a brief moment. Their value is laughable compared to their cost.

They believe that demand and offer in the market is an egg and chicken situation, so right now they're force feeding us the offer waiting for the demand to adapt

A lot of business people also think that AI is a "force multiplier" meaning that if they use it they can get more done in less time. Anything that can do that is basically a money printer at the business level, which is why all these execs and companies are so excited about it.

The problem is it's not or at least not reliably proven to be so. All these companies are jumping on board thinking "shove some AI in there and get 20% growth" when in reality there's no backing behind it working like that. And that's why a lot of customers are turned off, because from the consumer side, AI is just sloppy unoriginal junk. But on the business side they just see "Productivity is up" never mind that the productivity is garbage quality.

It attracts investors in the company not customers.

It was super cool for like three weeks. Now it's the gambler's fallacy they're hanging on to.

Think like a venture investor.

A small chance of huge growth via new technology can have a big payoff. They expect most companies to fail and are more worried about missing an opportunity than losing money in a single bad investment.

Nobody is quite sure where AI technology will be in ten years, but if it's big, it's going to make people who got in early very rich. It doesn't matter that it sucks now; the web sucked in 1995, but it made people who got in (and out) at the right time very rich.

It's a symptom of shareholder-driven development.

Many companies pushing AI have had huge layoffs, and haven't launched anything worthwhile in years. Many of these companies have a metric fuck-ton of data, and already do some kind of AI (they probably have had LLM's for years too). This way, they can spend money and make it look like they're doing groundbreaking stuff to ensure shareholders are happy.

They'll continue to do stealth layoffs of people outside of AI, until the hype dies down, and they'll move to the next grift - after laying off all of their AI folks.

It's a "don't want to miss the ship" thing where companies have to invest in whatever's trending in case it becomes successful and gives you an advantage. If they wait until it's proven, they might miss a competitive advantage (having to start learning after others). In the case of AI it's even more important since the promise sounds actually useful (the summarize anything quickly bit at least), unlike, say, NFT. At least that's kind of how it got explained to me at one of my jobs.

Because it attracts shareholders

For the same reason blockchain was hyped for a while.

1. Investor FOMO

2. Threatening Labor

Shareholders and investors are more profitable than customers.

I was discussing this with a friend. We came to the conclusion that "entrepreneur" means "unskilled, uneducated and unable to work" and that the harder a product is marketed, the more worthless it is.

The things that make a company successful are not the same as the things that make executives successful

I personally think people were "burned" by the whole NFT situation. During the NFT "hype" a year or two ago, a lot of companies were slow to get on board with releasing NFT products, and so they missed the bubble entirely. NFTs are, of course, silly but if they did take off, companies would have loved to have been part of the boon.

Fast forward to now and you have AI bros shilling AI in the same way cryptobros were shilling NFTs. However, this time it's different! They have results, they have technology. Microsoft is on board! They have fancy tech demos which are not staged at all! If you didn't have experience with the technology and limitations, you would be lead to believe that this is the same as the NFT bubble, but it's actually going to be a real technology rather than snake oil.

I think there's also the issue that it takes a long time to bring a product to market. Imagine you've spent millions developing software and hardware for your AI coffee machine or whatever and it turns out that there's no market demand. You can't really turn to your stakeholders and say "oops, we made a mistake and have to cancel this product. Sorry!", you have to finish the product and try to recoup losses where you can. That's why there's all these weird posts advertising AI products - they can't just not release a product, and AI bros might be tempted to buy it.

I also wonder if the whole AI hate is bias due to us being here on mastodonlemmy... We tend towards fairly cynical people who are critical towards new technology and corporations. Maybe actual consumers who aren't online all day and clued into the tech scene are wowwed by AI. I've certainly seen people here casually remark that they use ChatGPT and Copilot.

Because whilst technical people know it has limited applications (like blockchain), business people tend to fall for buzzwords easily because they don't realise a lot of the things it does were solved in other ways

A lot of people have come to realize that LLMs and generative AI aren't what they thought it was. They're not electric brains that are reasonable replacements for humans. They get really annoyed at the idea of a company trying to do that.

Some companies are just dumb and want to do it anyway because they misread their customers.

Some companies know their customer hate it but their research shows that they'll still make more money doing it.

Many people that are actually working with AI realize that AI is great for a much larger set of problems. Many of those problems are worth a ton of money; (eg. monitoring biometric data to predict health risks earlier, natural disaster prediction and fraud detection).

AI is the new ad driven model.

Everything that AI touches, ends up machine learning content.

AI DJ? I now have your name your email address and every single taste you have in music. As you use the app I will gain more insight into more music that you are or might be interested in.

That roomba thats running around your house looking for socks and cables not to run over, is also image processing on everything in your house. We know how big your house is they probably know how big my TV is.

They're not just farming your email and text messages to figure out what to sell you they know at a core intimate level what you're interests are.

They're in for a rude awakening in a few years. All of this AI information gathering is a bubble. You have companies like anovo complaining that they can't afford to host a single website. All this AI training is not cheap and the return on investment is not great after the initial plunge right?

I see two basic reasons.

1. it gives companies plausible argument to embed telemetry into their products. Should your TV manufacturer or coffee maker manufacturer be able to monitor every single button you press on your device? Probably not, but they would like to “because AI”! Now they have an excuse to be as invasive as they want, “to serve you better”. The dream - for them - would be total surveillance of your habits to sell you more shit. Remember, it always comes back to money.

2. The old adage never fails: if it’s free, you are the product. Imagine AI being so pervasive, that now everywhere you look, everything you interact with can subtly suggest things. It doesn’t have to be overt. But if AI can nudge the behavior of the masses to do a thing, like buy more soda, or favor one brand over another, then it has succeeded in boosting company bottom line. Sure the AI can do useful shit for you, but the true AI problem companies want to solve is “say or do the right shit to influence this consumer to buy my thing”. You are the target the AI is operating on. And with billions of interactions and tremendous training, it will find the optimal way to influence the masses to buy the thing.

It delights me to lie to myself that they are nervous someone somewhere would pick a golden ticket with their AI application and they'd miss out. But more obvious explanation for big corpos is that they hide problematic data-mining, content appropriation, ad personalization and other stuff behind this curtain, maybe not for these crude tools alone, but to force a precedent into existence that they can do it whenever they like in the future. They make you give up your personal stonks for a shiny penny that is corporate LLM genies and they probably pay a lot to showcase their beauty at loss.

AI normalising data collection

It's all a sunk-cost fallacy. They've dumped all of this money into it, so therefore they have to double down on it.

Especially if they're trying to get a bunch of money from Wall Street and other investors.

The biggest contributor being all of these companies believe they can now just lay off a bunch of workers and make up the difference with these LLMs even though they are not at all a replacement for humans.

Less workers, less people that have to pay, and more money can be funneled to the top.

I don't know if it's AI specific or just connected devices that people are starting to avoid. I don't want anything with the word "smart" in it. I don't want anything that requires an app, and I try to avoid things that require an account. I think people are fucking finally figuring out that all this shit is designed to spy on you for profit, and will probably eventually require a subscription if it doesn't already. It's a bullshit business model. Make a fucking decent product, and sell it to people for a flat fee, and they'll be your customers for life. Stop trying to be a data company, or a subscription company.

As for the second part of your question, companies are pushing it so hard because it's like having a money printing press. They can turn a few months worth of work into an endless stream of money.

If my workplace is in any way representative, it's because decisions are made by close to retirement out of touch old geezers who want to virtue signal very hard that they are not out of touch old geezers. So they push the "new thing" for lack of any actually innovative ideas of their own. Then, when the younger team members who do have some rough knowledge of the "new thing" try to explain why it might be a bad idea, they call them afraid of progress and double down on the "new thing" even harder.

They think they’ll get money.

Is why.

Unless a hyped-up investor gives it to them, they won’t.

Just dumb. In the case of the company i work for at least.

Two mains reasons:

Attracting investors

Attracting talented workers by signaling they are doing technical research

Also, people working in the industry might not even use those products. They want a cool job not a cool product

It will kill us all or solve everything, step right up and place your bets! No ma'am, there is no third option to bet on, none at all I say.