I stole this fair and square. Hope this hasn't been posted yet.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
214 points (98.2% liked)
Fuck AI
5751 readers
1502 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Really, it reminds me of nothing so much as NFTs. Cryptocurrency in general, sure, but especially NFTs. Banks are cooked! Traditional mortgages are cooked! The stock market is cooked! Fiat currency is cooked! We're going to tokenize everything and transform the world! Give us all your money so you can get in on the ground floor before it's too late!
It was empty hype, and it was obviously empty hype, and it went the same place all empty hype goes.
But it let some very rich people launder a lot of money and get even richer, and isn't that the end goal of the whole economy anyway?
This comparison is really common but i totally disagree with it.
NFTs are a total invention, the poster child of a solution looking for a problem. Nobody, anywhere on earth, ever wondered how they could get their hand on procedural art and speculate on it. The whole metaverse thing was the same way. The pure product of people who are so detached from normalcy that they can't even begin to fathom what humans tend to like and dislike in the real world.
AI has a million problems which don't need reiterating. I'm not disputing any of that. It may or may not be a technology that's viable in the long term (economically and environmentally), i won't speculate on that. But pre-LLMs there was a huge demand for better natural language processing. For semantically aware programs that are able to generalize and don't need retraining every 4 days. It was kind of the final frontier for software, the limit between "i can do that in a few sprints" and "i'll need a bunch of PhDs and 2 years of runway to possibly maybe make something work".
And i understand that final users only see the dogshit copilot integrations that they never asked for, and which are being pushed to their devices against their will, and becoming a privacy nightmare. And i understand that it's tiring to hear brain-rotted maximalists constantly making up idiotic predictions about humanity's future while they let the "groundbreaking tool of the day" riffle through their inbox and bank statements. But it would be a categorical error to believe that LLMs are anywhere as useless as, say, NFTs or the Metaverse.