this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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The dotcom bubble was different. Now, everything related to actual AI development is hyped but the dotcom bubble inflated entire indexes, "new market" indexes were setup comprising companies nobody had ever heard of. It was orders of magnitude worse.
I dunno, it could be similar. AI has this aura of being something that every business could make use of, even if they don't have a concrete use case. I could see "X but with an AI" be a similar bubble to "X but on the web". We'll see.
I got an ad months ago for a "vacuum with AI."
I think it was Samsung, it "used AI" to change heights between hard floors / carpet. It's the kind of thing that would have been marketed as "Algorithmic" in the 2000s or "Auto-vac technology" in the 1960s. Marketing has just reached the point where they jump on anything with almost negative notice.
It's already happening. "AI" is being thrown at any wall to see if it sticks regardless of actual usefulness or potential consequences. A couple of days ago we had an LLM powered recipe bot telling people to make ant poison sandwiches.
We are not only facing an economic bubble, but the hype risks tarnishing any useful applications of ML technology too when the bubble eventually bursts.
I'm not sure how we steer away from this however. The problem is caused by Silicon Valley attitudes and culture itself more than the tech itself. I wish we could get away from the term "AI" though, it's a very loaded term that gives out unrealistic expectations from the start.