Something can be useful and still be a bubble at the same time.
AI is such a thing.
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AI is such a thing.
Either AI is a total fraud, completely useless (at least for programming), or it's deus ex machina.
But reality has more than one bit to answer questions like "Is AI a hype?"
Despite only recently becoming a father and feeling like I am in my prime, I've seen many hypes.
And IT is an eternal cycle of hypes. Every few years a new holy cow is sent through the village to bring salvation to all of us and rid us of every problem (un)imaginable.
To give a few examples:
Client-Server SPAs Industry 4.0 Machine Learning Agile Blockchain Cloud Managed Languages
To me LLMs are nice, though no revelation.
I can use them fine to generate JS or Python code, because apparently the training sets were big enough, and they help me by writing boilerplate code I was gonna write anyway.
When I try them to help me write Rust or Zig, they fall extremely short though.
LLMs are extremely overhyped. They made a few people very rich by promising too much.
They are not AI by any means but marketing.
But they are a tool. And as such they should be treated. Use them when appropriate, but don't hail them...
You were previously talking about AI being a bubble and also useful For reference, wikipedia defines a bubble as: "a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation". I find that hard to reason about. One way to think about it is that all that AI does is create economic value, and for it to be useful it would have to create more economic value than it destroys. But that's hard to reason about without knowing the actual economics of the business, which the labs are not super transparent about. On the other hand I would imagine that all that infra building by all big players shows some level of confidence that we are way past "is it going to be useful enough?". That is not what reasonable people do when they think there's a bubble, at least that would be unprecedented.
And that's why I was asking.