The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public

Having seen the almost rabid and fearful reactions of product owners first hand around forcing AI into every product, it’s because all these companies are in panic mode. Many of these folks are not thinking clearly and have no idea what they’re doing. They don’t think they have time to think it through. Doing something is better than nothing. It’s all theatre for their investors coupled with a fear of being seen as falling behind. Nobody is going to have a measured and well thought through approach when they’re being pressured from above to get in line and add AI in any way. The top execs have no ideas, they just want AI. You’re not even allowed to say it’s a bad idea in a lot of bigger companies. Get in line or get a new job. At some point this period will pass and it will be pretty embarrassing for some folks.

eventually, people (investors) notice when their money is scared...

Yeah the internal 'experts' pushing ai having no idea what they're doing but acting like they do is like a weird fever dream lol

Everyone nodding along, yup yup this all makes sense

The product I'm working on is privately owned. Hence no investors. We're still in the process of cramming AI into everything.

Companies that don't invent the car get to go extinct.

This is the next great upset. Everyone's hair is on fire and it's anybody's ball game.

I wouldn't even count the hyperscalers as certain to emerge victorious. The unit economics of everything and how things are bought and sold might change.

We might have agents that scrub ads from everything and keep our inboxes clean. We might find content of all forms valued at zero, and have no need for social networking and search as they exist today.

And for better or worse, there might be zero moat around any of it.

> agents that scrub ads from everything

This is called an ad blocker.

> keep our inboxes clean

This is called a spam filter.

The entire parent comment is just buzzword salad. In fact I am inclined to think it was written by an LLM itself.

That entire user's post history reads like the output of a very poorly trained LLM.

I mean, my post history was used to train ChatGPT since HN is one of the major training data sources and I have a decade and a half of comment history.

It'd be funny if you blamed me for emdashes or "delve", but it's a bit rude to suggest that it's the other way around.

You're not a normie and defaults matter. Most of the world doesn't even know what an ad blocker is let alone know how to install one.

There's really only two browsers and one search engine. It doesn't matter what you do, because the rest of society is ensnared and the economic activities that matter are held captive.

If generative models compress all of the useful activities (lowering the incumbency moat) and agents can perform actions on our behalf, then it reasons that we may have agents that act as personal assistants and have our best interests as top priority. Ads are clearly in violation of that.

It's so funny to be a contrarian on HN. I get quite a lot of predictions right, yet all I get in exchange is downvotes and claims that I'm an LLM. I'll have to write a retro one of these days if I ever find the free time.

Even if your company is privately owned, it has at least 1 investor (possibly just the founder), and this urge to cram AI is no doubt coming from him.

Why are investors so stupid? I mean this genuinely. Every time I hear about investors and what they want, it seems to me like they make dumb decisions that implode on themselves.

I mean, you would think someone very rich who invests in companies would be somewhat smart. But, I'm convinced, a lot of them would do much better if they made no decisions at all and left everything up to entropy.

My pet theory / speculation: Investors (as individuals and as a class) are just not very creative or insightful people. They chase trends and look to "other investors" for clues about what to invest in. If "everyone is doing AI" then there must be money being made there, so I must do AI too. The thought process stops there.

I could write a book on this. But it wouldn't make me any friends.

You can either be right, or have friends.

Or, the owners and/or managers of the product just believe something you disagree with, and smooth execution of anything ambitious in computing is just difficult and takes lots of attempts.

You can have both things. Just don't be a dick about what you believe (at least, not to everybody).

They already made smart decisions. This money is for dumb decisions that may pay off big.

Imagine having so much money that you've already invested in stocks, bonds, real estate, you own everything, you got bored going to Vegas, and have nothing else to do with your money. So you start to toss some of it into a fund with others. Not a hedge fund mind you. You've done that already too. No, you stick it into a fund to be managed by lunatics. Because have enough money and you want to see a moon shot play out for fun.

That's the kinda stupid "F you" money we're talking about. It comes from people who don't care. They literally don't care. They just want to say they invested in XYZ, because no one cares about where their money came from or what their normal investments are.

This is the kinda very rich we're talking about and they aren't all there in the head sometimes.

I wish I had that much money lol.

> You're not a normie and defaults matter. Most of the world doesn't even know what an ad blocker is let alone know how to install one

These problems don't need LLMs to solve; they need something that also starts with 'L', but is a lot more boring—legislation. The online world is rampant with rubbish and misinformation not because LLMs aren't yet at our beck and call like a digital French maid, but because laws in most parts of the world haven't caught up and multi-national megacorps do whatever the heck they see fit. Especially so in 'capital-friendly' countries. One sees a lot less of this in the PRC, for instance.

I would love to see a GDPR-style set of legislation straight up addressing everything from privacy defaults on social media to aggressively blocking online ad networks.

> I get quite a lot of predictions right

Good for you, then.

> Why are investors so stupid?

Some are but many aren't. The reason so many investors are pushing on AI (or other buzz-trend du jour) is that history shows 'disruptive new technologies' tend to correlate with some startups quickly growing and becoming 'unicorn' successful. The problem is that this historical correlation appears more obvious after the fact than when it's still emerging. And of course there are lots of caveats and other requirements which a given startup and implementation may or may not meet.

Since professional VCs tend to take a portfolio approach to investing their funds on behalf of their limited partner stakeholders, they generally divide their funds into several broad 'investment themes' based on what they perceive as potentially disruptive new technologies or markets. Like roughly 30% here and 20% there with 15 or 20% left for things which don't fit a theme. This approach is supposed to ensure they don't miss out on having a few bets in each big category. In 2005 social media platforms were an important theme. In 2015 it was SaaS.

NDA's are a thing... that's the main obstacle.

They're not stupid, or at least there's method in their madness. They treat the market as a big Texas Hold'em game and everyone is trying to bluff everyone and no-one wants to "fold" yet on AI, no matter which cards have on their hand.

Hey, at least you have friends.