Fuck AI

It’s being pushed in corporate America, hard.

OK ok yes and I have a theory about it!

So... my theory is that, and it might be shocked, by VCs, investment banks, business angels, C-suites, so basically people with BIG money are actually learning. I know, I know, sounds crazy but hear me out.

I think they are learning NOT about a topic, say AI, or XR, or 3D printing, etc no, that's pointless, no they are instead learning about real materials, things like pretty curve published on Harvard Business Review or McKinsey Quarterly or HackerNews. These people learned over time about the Gartner hype cycle and they are learning to both ride it AND amplify it. VCs have a big incentive for big bets. They do NOT care about your mom&pop software shop which might just reach a million paying customers. No, they make BIG bets that nobody else can, that's their cornered market. If it doesn't reach a billion users, not even customers, then it's just not interesting to them. They want, no they NEED, something that will grow fast, very fast, and big, VERY big. This way they fund the infrastructure and in exchange they get the only thing they care about, shares. Everything else is just a hurdles to go over, or remove entirely thanks to lobbying.

They specifically look for this dependency so that they can't be bought out, 1000x return on projects that need them. It's a parasitic relationship that they excel at. Now again this isn't new but IMHO what you are hinting at, the amplitude of the push is arguably new.

One person at the center of this embodies it perfectly : Sam Altman. He lead YCombinator at the heart of the SiliconValley. SV isn't special for the skills, they are plenty of very smart people everywhere else. What's special is that smart people go there to go money, a lot of money very fast in exchange for the promise of tremendous growth. Altman has seen hundreds if not thousands of such proposal and he evaluate them. He knows precisely what sticks, what people offered but also what promises get funded.

He keeps on doing exactly that. He keeps on promising MORE.

So... yes I think the AI push is bigger than anything else. It's bigger than cryptocurrencies, it's bigger than the metaverse, it's supposedly THE technology that changes everything else. We heard this before. In fact we hear this at the beginning of every cycle. This time though grifters, because no matter how big the bank account is, they still are grifters (look at Musk, promising constantly what everybody wants to hear, delivering a fraction of it so small it became a joke) who get their power through getting everybody to push for their promises.

TL;DR: yes and it's a pattern. Everything gets pitched as more revolutionary than ever before.

because the bubble is about to break, and google, MS, openai and other is cramming into as much other hardware as possible to recover the losses of putting all thier eggs in one basket. palintir and similar is trying to stave it off by peddling it to LEO on several countries.

MS largely neglected most of thier other products: xbox, Windows os versions for AI solely. and google largely neglects thier phone development for AI.

'Turbo' everything in the 80s and 'High Definition' everything in the Aughts maybe?

3D Televisions and Movies. I loved that life at Best Buy and films.

Does it change colors in hot water?

Don't think is the prevailing sentiment. Of course when you rely on sentiment you leave logic and reason far behind.

VR...

Smartphones

The Internet

PCs

Television

Telephone

Credit cards

Cars

Gaming consoles/games