I remember when I suggested that I shouldn’t learn to write in 1998, because you can just type on the computer, I was laughed at. I was told that at best I’d still need to learn to write, and at worst computers can turn out as a fad due to them requiring electricity to work, they can crash and go bad, etc. Pease note that my dislike of writing was heavily influenced by likely having dyspraxia, and a lot of cheaper pens/pencils being mildly painful to hold.
However, the very same people are now disencouraging anything that the AI is promised to replace. Don’t draw, just use Dall-E. Don’t code, just use ChatGPT. Don’t play music, just use Suno. Don’t make movies, just wait until it can do it good enough. The music one is even often being pushed by those who absolutely despised electronic music for “not requiring any talent, just pressing buttons”, all while AI music is literally what ignorant rock/metal kids thought electronic music production was. Even one person, who criticized me for using amp sims on my PC instead of a wall of tube amplifiers is more favorable than not towards AI music.
I wonder if those who now disencourage art classes in favor of a short lesson on how to prompt an image generator will also disencourage writing due to speech-to-text technologies. Maybe the problem is that they don’t use LLMs, but often a more primitive version of neural networks.
And I’m not 100% against new tools. I even use Neural Amp Modeler, sometimes even two instances with one having a Boss HM-2 response for that Swedish chainsaw tone. But these prompt machines are barely more than toys for real professional work, due to the lack of actual control beyond prompting.
OK ok yes and I have a theory about it!
So… my theory is that, and it might be shocked, by VCs, investment banks, business angels, C-suites, so basically people with BIG money are actually learning. I know, I know, sounds crazy but hear me out.
I think they are learning NOT about a topic, say AI, or XR, or 3D printing, etc no, that’s pointless, no they are instead learning about real materials, things like pretty curve published on Harvard Business Review or McKinsey Quarterly or HackerNews. These people learned over time about the Gartner hype cycle and they are learning to both ride it AND amplify it. VCs have a big incentive for big bets. They do NOT care about your mom&pop software shop which might just reach a million paying customers. No, they make BIG bets that nobody else can, that’s their cornered market. If it doesn’t reach a billion users, not even customers, then it’s just not interesting to them. They want, no they NEED, something that will grow fast, very fast, and big, VERY big. This way they fund the infrastructure and in exchange they get the only thing they care about, shares. Everything else is just a hurdles to go over, or remove entirely thanks to lobbying.
They specifically look for this dependency so that they can’t be bought out, 1000x return on projects that need them. It’s a parasitic relationship that they excel at. Now again this isn’t new but IMHO what you are hinting at, the amplitude of the push is arguably new.
One person at the center of this embodies it perfectly : Sam Altman. He lead YCombinator at the heart of the SiliconValley. SV isn’t special for the skills, they are plenty of very smart people everywhere else. What’s special is that smart people go there to go money, a lot of money very fast in exchange for the promise of tremendous growth. Altman has seen hundreds if not thousands of such proposal and he evaluate them. He knows precisely what sticks, what people offered but also what promises get funded.
He keeps on doing exactly that. He keeps on promising MORE.
So… yes I think the AI push is bigger than anything else. It’s bigger than cryptocurrencies, it’s bigger than the metaverse, it’s supposedly THE technology that changes everything else. We heard this before. In fact we hear this at the beginning of every cycle. This time though grifters, because no matter how big the bank account is, they still are grifters (look at Musk, promising constantly what everybody wants to hear, delivering a fraction of it so small it became a joke) who get their power through getting everybody to push for their promises.
TL;DR: yes and it’s a pattern. Everything gets pitched as more revolutionary than ever before.