Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

every other article these days on this site is about AI. And it's incredibly tedious and annoying.

Isn't it enough that clueless marketers who get their Tech knowledge from businessinsider and bloomberg are constantly harping on about AI.

Seems we as a community have resigned or given up in this battle against common sense. Maybe long ago. Still there should be some form of moderation penalizing these shill posts that only glorify AI as being the future, ... the same way that not everything about crypto or the blockchain ended up on the FP. Seems with AI we're looking the other way and are OK with it?

Or maybe it's me.

It's you.

The AI discussions can indeed be repetitive and tiresome here, especially for regulars, but they already seem to be downweighted and clear off the front page quite fast.

But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving a genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the posts belong here and the high engagement that props them up seems expected.

> It's you.

Not just him.

> But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving a genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the posts belong here and the high engagement that props them up seems expected.

In your opinion (and admittedly others), but that doesn't make the overhype any less tiresome. Yes it is novel technology, but there's alway novel technology, and it isn't all in one area, but you wouldn't know it by what hits the front page these days.

Anyway, it's useless to shake fists at the clouds. This hype will pass, just like all the others before it, and the discussion can again be proportional to the relevance of the topic.

I don't know about the professional professionals, but as a science professor, I have to wear a lot of hats, which has required me to gain skills in a multitude of areas outside my area of deep expertise.

I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY.

Those services help me run out scripts for data munging, etc etc very quickly. I don't use it for high expertise writing, as I find it takes more than I get back, but I do use it to put words on a page for more general things. If your deep expertise is programming, you may not use it much either for that. But man oh man has it magnified my output on the constellation of things I need to get done.

What other innovation in the last decade has been this disruptive? Two years ago, I didn't use this. Now I do as part of my regular routine, and I am more valuable for it. So yes, there is hype, but man oh man, is the hype deserved. Even if AI winter started right now, the productivity boom from Claude level LLMs is nothing short of huge.

> I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY […] What other innovation in the last decade has been this disruptive?

I use some sort of IDE everyday. Previously at my early days, I was a “true-hacker” and using Vim in console to type out massive code bases, we had waterfall development practices, I would fumble through source codes of various poorly documented features of the language or libraries for hours to figure out about needed function/method/attribute and how anything really worked and the quirks of strange error messages needing to call up the vendor or buy a book on the topic and hope it had answers… and of course, I practiced typing every weekend to speed up my typing speed.

Now, I just type something and the IDE reads my mind and shows appropriate suggestions and also helpfully imports the packages for me while also constantly formatting my codebase on save and raising red/yellow squigglies to suggest my mistakes. I copy paste any quirky errors in a search engine and immediately find other human beings reporting the problem and solutions, I can happily continue developing on the same codebase and parallel features while other teams can continue with their features and we’ll know soon if we have stepped on each others’ toes shortly in CI pipeline. What took me weeks now takes like few hours and if someone told me to do the same in Vim, I’d be blankly looking at them because that is arcane. Of course my IDE misguesses sometimes and I can correct it, but I am insanely productive now compared to decades back. What other innovation has made this kind of gains?

Also I could take a horse and go to a duty travel in another continent for a several month or even year journey, but now I can take a flight and be there in hour and I am saving insane amount of time.

The examples can go on, we have new novelties which are ground breaking, but AI is too much hype, and it is not well deserved. All the hype comes because the VC money burning on it and needs the prep the market for massive return. Too much of hype can turn sour if that topic had been seen to rise and die a fee times, hence it is natural that a lot of HN audience do not feel great to look at this anymore.