from Hacker News

AI Hype Is Cooling – New survey

by zer0tonin on 11/12/24, 10:11 PM with 127 comments

• by cj on 11/12/24, 10:36 PM

  I'm the "IT guy" at our 30 person startup.

  My 2024 stance is "buy every AI add-on and decide whether to keep it next year"

  So our team has access to Enterprise ChatGPT, Gemini, Notion AI, Slack AI, and basically every AI add-on in every SaaS platform that offers it as an upsell (Github Copilot, ReadMe AI, etc).

  2024 is the year of "I don't know what the hell these AI tools are going to be useful for, so let's buy them all"

  2025 will be the year of "Ok, we spent $xxx on all these AI tools last year, is anyone actually using them?"

  I predict we'll be canceling a lot of those subscriptions. Which all in cost us over $100/mo per employee.

• by MBCook on 11/12/24, 11:27 PM

  The sad thing is all the damage it’s done in the meantime.

  I just saw a mention about how a homework help company called Chegg has had their stock drop 99% because everyone is just using ChatGPT.

  They were a real functioning company, with hundreds or thousands of employees and contractors. All of whom are basically going to be laid off because some company burned through a bunch of VC money to lure everyone away with “the new thing“.

  All the artists who lost jobs or commissions. All the companies who ended up wasting a ton of time trying to build AI or integrate AI features that aren’t actually useful. And maybe they’ll end up in a product in two years and by then no one will care or want them.

  All the electricity, the silicon, the water for cooling, the new data center is being built that won’t be needed.

  Just tons and tons of waste everywhere.

  ChatGPT is neat. For all we know we’re near a local maxima of what we’re capable of achieving without another completely new approach that will take 10 or 15 years to figure out. There’s no proof that the acceleration and capabilities we’ve seen over the last 2 to 3 years will continue like that.

  I know my company has been asked about adding AI into The main product I work on. I don’t see any benefit. I’ve been told when they ask the customers what it would do for them, they can’t say either. But they seem to have been trained to ask for it by the hype.

  Remind me of all the nonsense about chat bots being integrated into every company’s webpage five or six years ago. They’re not helpful. But they were the thing.

  ChatGPT has some uses, but is also way more expensive/wasteful.

  I hope the hype moves on fast. I’d like this stuff that shakes out to stick around but what’s going on right now is just way too wasteful for my taste.

  Feels like almost everyone is trying to build the biggest Z-Ray they can because they’ve been told it’s an amazing discover. No one actually knows what it is, or how to build one, but that hasn’t stopped trillions of dollars from being poured into it. And if we get there, it may not be worth anywhere near what was paid.

• by gradus_ad on 11/12/24, 10:53 PM

  The only AI product I've found to be useful is ChatGPT and the like. Just chatting it up with a GPT, exploring ideas, getting feedback etc. All derivative products, including coding tools, have been unhelpful at best and actively harmful to productivity at worst.

• by fsndz on 11/12/24, 10:38 PM

  I am not surprised at all. The excitement is receding in accordance with the hype cycle theory. People tried the tools and saw their worth and the limitations. This is actually good news, it means we are entering a moment of truth, a moment when transforming knowledge into productivity and profits becomes crucial ! (https://www.lycee.ai/blog/large-language-models-productivity...)

• by voidfunc on 11/12/24, 10:40 PM

  The big winner for AI at the end of the day is going to be Microsoft and Microsoft-like companies that can integrate AI and Copilots into existing tools, with an understanding of how those tools are used by daily users and without significantly increasing prices.

  The rest of it? Mostly useless.

• by hi_hi on 11/12/24, 11:52 PM

  The problem for me with all these HypeTech's is they appear to promise something valuable that is always just out of reach.

  With Crypto it was the idea of micro payments. I want to pay to read news articles, or watch a movie, or tip someone I value online, but I don't want to sign up to some monthly subscription or give over my card details. It seemed to offer a viable alternative to the advertising economy which drives everything now.

  With LLMs it was the idea that I no longer have to trawl through marketing websites or endless social media posts to find the nugget of information I'm interested in. As a dev, I shouldn't have to care about responsive designs or tech stacks or accessibility or versions of node libraries, all to provide a website. Instead just pump the data directly to the AI and call it a day.

  The 2 concepts could even work together so my "original thoughts" can be monetised so I can be paid royalties for my "art", like musicians are today.

• by cadence- on 11/12/24, 10:50 PM

  It's nice to see that the hype is cooling. There will be more room to focus discussions on what's actually useful, and stop with the endless "I love it", vs. "I hate it", vs. "I fear it" discussions.

• by neilv on 11/12/24, 11:44 PM

  > Nearly half (48%) of all desk workers would be uncomfortable admitting to their manager that they used AI for common workplace tasks. The top reasons for workers’ discomfort are 1) feeling like using AI is cheating 2) fear of being seen as less competent and 3) fear of being seen as lazy

  First, I love that so many are uncomfortable, and that there are limits to the LLM cheating frenzy.

  Second, I wonder whether there are additional big reasons (perhaps conflated with the above reasons):

  * Not wanting to be seen as performing low quality work.

  * Not wanting to suggest that their job can be replaced by AI tools.

  * Not wanting to get caught leaking company IP or client/customer/partner data to various services.

  * Not wanting to attract attention to possible copyright infringement or plagiarism scandal by LLM or other model (whether the company has rules about that, or not).

• by debacle on 11/12/24, 11:23 PM

  Maybe part of the problem is most of the people claiming to be "AI experts" are riding the wave but don't really have much to offer.

  My company was recently offered a $5k/mo package that would "supercharge our sales with AI." I don't think the presenter had anything material to offer besides some very basic workflow integrations that anyone who is using AI in their day to day has (mostly) already identified.

• by bossyTeacher on 11/12/24, 11:09 PM

  I am calling it. GPT-5 if it ever comes out will be the first sign to the layman and outsiders that we are officially and unambiguously on the downwards stage of the hype cycle. I don't see OpenAI and DeepMind going anyware but I suspect all the API wrapper companies will disappear in 2025

• by xnx on 11/13/24, 3:18 AM

  NVDA stock seems like a reasonable proxy for measuring AI hype. I'm not seeing cooling right now.

• by kylecazar on 11/12/24, 11:43 PM

  The hype is self-fulfilling. We say it's going to drastically impact everything, and then we rush to build it into our products and slap it all over the marketing materials. Enough people do this simultaneously, and it's drastically impacted everything.

• by ratedgene on 11/12/24, 11:39 PM

  To be honest, AI is very much still in its discovery/explore phase.

• by Apocryphon on 11/12/24, 11:23 PM

  So... what becomes of the tech industry when we run out of hype fads? Two more years of stagnant hiring? It's good that interest rates are starting to lower again, at least.

• by asdev on 11/12/24, 10:49 PM

  who is actually making sustainable revenue solving a real problem using AI? I can only think of the foundational models(OpenAI, Gemini etc), coding helpers(Cursor, GH Copilot)

• by saomcomrad56 on 11/12/24, 11:21 PM

  Just in time for crypto hype season!

• by ethbr1 on 11/13/24, 12:06 AM

  At the end of the day, AI is integration.

  If it's not grounded in the right, updated contexts or provided tools to interact with the apps a user cares about... it's a glorified chatbot.

  I expect what we'll see in the next 5 years for enterprise adoption is progress on both those fronts.

  And by progress, I mean "supports interactions with that VB 6 app that's still a critical piece of a company's workflow." (Or SAP, Salesforce, Epic, etc.)

• by desireco42 on 11/12/24, 11:59 PM

  I don't think it is at all, it is just shaping into different forms. A lot of AI solutions are trivial still and we are long way from sophisticated ones.

  I think people affected, which is most of us, are really hurting and want this to be true.

• by m3kw9 on 11/12/24, 11:17 PM

  It’s cooling but that’s because the next APi for flagship models haven’t shipped in a while. Every frontier co is on their .5 gen right now.

• by dmezzetti on 11/12/24, 11:22 PM

  trough of disillusionment?

• by aegypti on 11/12/24, 11:23 PM

  Did anything novel ever come out of people integrating on demand UI into chat & conversations, or is it still in a sort of “low-code” use case space?

• by drcode on 11/12/24, 11:07 PM

  Companies are hiring fewer people that understand a technology that enable companies to hire fewer people- News at 11.