By the looks of it, 2026 might be the year where reality and fiction will finally collide with AI and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.
But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.
> and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.
Umm, what? For the past 3 years, every year I've said something along the lines of "even if models stop improving now, we'll be working on this for years, finding new ways to use it and make cool stuff happen". The hype is already warranted. To have used these tools and not be hyped is simply denial at this point.
Maybe AI is useful to you, but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board.
Most of Mag-7 are planning to spend over 500B on capex this year alone on building out datacenters for AI pipelines that have yet to prove that it can generate a sustainable profit. Yes, AI is useful in some environments, but the current pricing is heavily subsidized. So my point stand, the hype is not warranted.
"All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.
> No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
Perhaps this is the failure to understand the distinction between a technology and a meta-technology. Upgrading the factory that builds the robots is much different than upgrading the robots.
A technology is a set of methods and tools for achieving the desired results (generally in a reliable and reproducible way). Or, in a broader sense of the word, it's the idea of applying scientific knowledge to solving practical problems, and the process of such application.
Or (taking the other side) failure to notice the distinction between a technology and a pump-and-dump. The technology (attention/diffusion) is awesome. The hype is unbelievable. Literally.
What is the point being made here? Some past technologies were overhyped, therefore AI is overhyped? Well, some past consumer technologies did change the world (smartphones, texting, video streaming, dating apps, online shopping, etc), so where's the argument that AI doesn't belong to this second group?
Also, every single close friend of mine makes some use of LLMs, while none of them used any the overhyped technologies listed. So you need a specially strong argument to group them together.
It's not unsubstantiated though. The claim is "People frequently assert that 'this time is different' and they are almost always wrong" and it proceeded to provide a reasonable list of analogous manias.
This only doesn't feel like substantiation if you reject the notion that these cases are analogous.
"You shouldn't eat that."
"Why not?"
"Everyone else who's eaten it has either died or gotten really sick."
"But I'm different! Why should I listen to your unsubstantiated claims?"
"(lists names of prior victims)"
"That doesn't mean anything. I'm different. You're just making vague and dismissive unsubstantiated claims."
The claim isn't "AI bad" the claim is more along the lines of "there's a lot of money changing hands and this has all the earmarks of a classic hype cycle; while attention/diffusion models may amount to something the claims of their societal impacts are almost certainly being exaggerated by people with a financial stake in keeping the bubble inflated as long as possible, to pull in as many suckers as possible."
If you want another example (which you won't find analogous if you've already drunk the koolaid):
OP here. Unless you're still watching Quibi on your curved TV, delivered via WiMax then, yeah, I'd say it was pretty bloody substantiated.
I like technology. I made a decent living from it. But if I had chased every hyped fad that was promised as the next big thing, I doubt I'd be as happy as I am now.
You're not really saying anything, though. For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. This IS changing the world and our industry, regardless of whether it reaches the heights of the hypers.
I mean you're just stating that sometimes tech doesn't meet it's hype. What's insightful about that? It's a given; cherry-picking examples doesn't prove your case.
The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype.
MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train.
Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything.
I'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype.
Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.
I personally see plenty of hype but I've also been following the trends and using the tools "on the ground". At least in terms of software these tools are a substantial shift. Will they replace developers? No idea, but their impacts are likely to be felt for a very long time. Their rate of improvement in programming is growing rapidly.
Do feel AI is overall just hype? When did you last try AI tools and what about their use made you conclude they will likely be forgotten or ignored by the mainstream?
I spent an hour with Gemini this morning trying to get instructions to compile a common open source tool for an uncommon platform.
It was an hour of pasting in error messages and getting back "Aha! Here's the final change you need to make!"
Underwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it.
But, even if I'm wrong, we were told that COBOL would make programming redundant. Then UML was going to accelerate development. Visual programming would mean no more mistakes.
All of them are in the coding mix somewhere, and I suspect LLMs will be.
I hoped the article would be be a meta-discussion of "time" and perhaps relativity or some other phenomenon. Sigh, it's an investment thesis saying "This Time is Different" is a risky bet.
This just sounds like the "nothing ever happens" theorem slightly rephrased, of which Scott Alexander did a great refutation here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...
I would suggest editing the title to "This Time is Different". I think that captures the essence much better.
Love the Sir Terry reference.
I wonder if that was an automated HN edit?
Similarly to how titles that start with "how" usually have that word automatically removed.
Usually HN only auto-edits on first submission. If you go in and undo it manually as the submitter, you can force it to read how you intend.
And the HTTP headers
Author forgot Segway. Remember when it was going to fundamentally change humanity?
By the looks of it, 2026 might be the year where reality and fiction will finally collide with AI and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.
But like all the previous hype, most of the people that were the loudest won't say they were wrong, and they'll move to the next thing, pretending like they never were the one that portrayed AI as the holy Graal.
> and we'll be able to see if all the hype was warranted.
Umm, what? For the past 3 years, every year I've said something along the lines of "even if models stop improving now, we'll be working on this for years, finding new ways to use it and make cool stuff happen". The hype is already warranted. To have used these tools and not be hyped is simply denial at this point.
Maybe AI is useful to you, but the US economy is currently buoyed by promises of AI replacing the workforce across the board.
Most of Mag-7 are planning to spend over 500B on capex this year alone on building out datacenters for AI pipelines that have yet to prove that it can generate a sustainable profit. Yes, AI is useful in some environments, but the current pricing is heavily subsidized. So my point stand, the hype is not warranted.
Title got mangled somehow, the original title is "This time is different".
For me, this captures it:
"All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.
> No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
- Terry Pratchet's Faust Eric"
Perhaps this is the failure to understand the distinction between a technology and a meta-technology. Upgrading the factory that builds the robots is much different than upgrading the robots.
A technology is a set of methods and tools for achieving the desired results (generally in a reliable and reproducible way). Or, in a broader sense of the word, it's the idea of applying scientific knowledge to solving practical problems, and the process of such application.
What is meta-technology?
Or (taking the other side) failure to notice the distinction between a technology and a pump-and-dump. The technology (attention/diffusion) is awesome. The hype is unbelievable. Literally.
What is the point being made here? Some past technologies were overhyped, therefore AI is overhyped? Well, some past consumer technologies did change the world (smartphones, texting, video streaming, dating apps, online shopping, etc), so where's the argument that AI doesn't belong to this second group?
Also, every single close friend of mine makes some use of LLMs, while none of them used any the overhyped technologies listed. So you need a specially strong argument to group them together.
Nuclear weapons - this time is different
Internet - this time is different
iPhone - this time is different
I enjoyed Dave Cridland's comment more than the article. The article is dismissive of AI and other technologies in an unsubstantiated way.
New things are happening and it's exciting. "AI bad" statements without examples feel very head-in-sand.
It's not unsubstantiated though. The claim is "People frequently assert that 'this time is different' and they are almost always wrong" and it proceeded to provide a reasonable list of analogous manias.
This only doesn't feel like substantiation if you reject the notion that these cases are analogous.
"You shouldn't eat that."
"Why not?"
"Everyone else who's eaten it has either died or gotten really sick."
"But I'm different! Why should I listen to your unsubstantiated claims?"
"(lists names of prior victims)"
"That doesn't mean anything. I'm different. You're just making vague and dismissive unsubstantiated claims."
The claim isn't "AI bad" the claim is more along the lines of "there's a lot of money changing hands and this has all the earmarks of a classic hype cycle; while attention/diffusion models may amount to something the claims of their societal impacts are almost certainly being exaggerated by people with a financial stake in keeping the bubble inflated as long as possible, to pull in as many suckers as possible."
If you want another example (which you won't find analogous if you've already drunk the koolaid):
https://theblundervault.substack.com/p/the-segway-delusion-w...
OP here. Unless you're still watching Quibi on your curved TV, delivered via WiMax then, yeah, I'd say it was pretty bloody substantiated.
I like technology. I made a decent living from it. But if I had chased every hyped fad that was promised as the next big thing, I doubt I'd be as happy as I am now.
You're not really saying anything, though. For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world. This IS changing the world and our industry, regardless of whether it reaches the heights of the hypers.
I mean you're just stating that sometimes tech doesn't meet it's hype. What's insightful about that? It's a given; cherry-picking examples doesn't prove your case.
> For every tech hype that has failed, there is another that's changed the world.
Well, no, the ratio is most definitely not 1-to-1.
The thing is, the successful tech rarely get the excessive hype.
MRNA vaccines. Where are the countless breathless articles about these literal life saving tech? A few, maybe, but very few dudes pumping out asinine "white papers" and trying to ride the hype train.
Solar and battery. Again, lots of real world impact but remarkably few unhinged blowhards writing endless newsletters about how this changes everything.
I'm struggling to think of a tech from the last 20 years which has lived up to its hype.
Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.
I personally see plenty of hype but I've also been following the trends and using the tools "on the ground". At least in terms of software these tools are a substantial shift. Will they replace developers? No idea, but their impacts are likely to be felt for a very long time. Their rate of improvement in programming is growing rapidly.
Do feel AI is overall just hype? When did you last try AI tools and what about their use made you conclude they will likely be forgotten or ignored by the mainstream?
I spent an hour with Gemini this morning trying to get instructions to compile a common open source tool for an uncommon platform.
It was an hour of pasting in error messages and getting back "Aha! Here's the final change you need to make!"
Underwhelming doesn't even begin to describe it.
But, even if I'm wrong, we were told that COBOL would make programming redundant. Then UML was going to accelerate development. Visual programming would mean no more mistakes.
All of them are in the coding mix somewhere, and I suspect LLMs will be.
> write an article dismissing ai
> usage is copy pasting code back and forth with gemini
the jokes write themselves
Unrelated to the conversation but:
> Not everything is written to be insightful. Some things are just written to get them out of my head.
I like that, going to use it as the motivation to get some things out of my own head.
Yes! More blogging :-)
I hoped the article would be be a meta-discussion of "time" and perhaps relativity or some other phenomenon. Sigh, it's an investment thesis saying "This Time is Different" is a risky bet.
That sounds like an interesting article. You should write it.