Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?
I got to try one once. It was very underwhelming...
LLMs have hundreds of millions of users. I just can't stress how insane this was. This wasn't built on the back of Facebook or Instagram's distribution like Threads. The internet consumer has never so readily embraced something so fast.
Calling LLMs "hype" is an example of cope, judging facts based on what is hoped to be true even in the face of overwhelming evidence or even self-evident imminence to the contrary.
I know people calling "hype" are motivated by something. Maybe it is a desire to contain the inevitable harm of any huge rollout or to slow down the disruption. Maybe it's simply the egotistical instinct to be contrarian and harvest karma while we can still feign to be debating shadows on the wall. I just want to be up front. It's not hype. Few people calling "hype" can believe that this is hype and anyone who does believes it simply isn't credible. That won't stop people from jockeying to protect their interests, hoping that some intersubjective truth we manufacture together will work in their favor, but my lord is the "hype" bandwagon being dishonest these days.
I think the core issue is separating the perception of value versus actual value. There have been a couple of studies to this effect, pointing to a misalignment towards overestimating value and productivity boosts.
One reason this happens imo, is because we sequester a good portion of the cognitive load of our thinking to the latter parts of the process so when we are evaluating the solution we are primed to think we have saved time when the solution is sufficiently correct, or if we have to edit or reposition it by re-rolling, we don't account for the time spent because we may feel we didn't do anything.
I feel like this type of discussion is effectively a top topic every day. To me, the hype is not in the utility it does have but in its future utility. The hype is based on the premise that these tools and their next iteration can and will make all knowledge-based work obsolete, but crucially, will yield value in areas of real need; cancer, aging, farming, climate, energy and etc.
If these tools stop short of those outcomes, then the investment all of SV has committed to it at this point will have been over invested and