Comment by KronisLV

> Even if the tech freezes in place, I think it will yield substantial economic value in the coming years.

The question is, where will this "economic value" be? Because "economic value" and actual progress that helps society are two very different things. For example, if someone wants to hire people, they can use "AI" to sift through the applications. But people looking for a job can also use "AI" to write their applications. In the end you may have created "economic value", but its an arms race and a waste of resources at the core, more digital paperwork, a waste of compute. So the actual value is not positive, it is negative. And we see that in many places where this so called "AI" is supposed to help.

Does it mean it is entirely useless? No, but the field of applications where it actually makes sense and has an overall net benefit is way smaller than many believe.

Plus, there are different types of neural networks in use for decades already. Look at OCR, for example, where the commercial OCR software switched to neural networks around the mid 90s already. So it is not that "AI" as such is bad, just that this generative neural network stuff is overly hyped by people who have absolutely no clue about it, but have to hop on the bandwagon to not be left out and keep shareholder values up, because most of these shareholders are equally stupid about the whole issue. Its a circus that burns many resources, money that could have created way more value in other areas.

>the main use case for which appears to be money laundering.

You say tomato, I say freedom from the tyranny of fiat power structures.

>It's very different from crypto, the main use case for which appears to be money laundering.

Which has substantial economic value (for certain groups of people).

> The current AI tech has opened up paths to develop applications that were impossible just a few years ago.

My argument is that if it's advertised as a direct precursor to AGI based on wishful thinking and people don't know any better, then it's no different to claims about how putting blockchain technology in X industry will solve all of its problems.

I use LLMs daily and don't scoff at AI generated imagery or use cases like agentic systems, but there absolutely is a similar hype cycle to every other innovation out there where people are borderline delusional in the initial stages (Kubernetes will solve all of our issues, moving to cloud and microservices will solve all of our issues, the blockchain will...), before the limitations crystallize and we know what each technology is good or bad at.

Though maybe that says more about human nature than the technology itself.

> It's very different from crypto, the main use case for which appears to be money laundering.

That's akin to saying "The main use case for AI appears to be stealing people's art and even for writers and others it seems to be firing people to replace them with soulless AI generated slop."

I'd even argue that there's nothing wrong with the technologies themselves, be it LLMs, AI for image, video, audio generation, blockchain and crypto, or whatever. The problems arise based on how the technologies are used, or in my argument above - how they're touted as the solution to all the problems. Some people profit a lot, others collide with reality and their limitations at speed.

In other words, if the technology will generate 100 billion USD of actual value but people are betting on 500 billion USD, then clearly we have a bit of an issue.

> Both Kubernetes and serverless (FaaS) is here to stay.

*in environments and projects where they are a good fit

> Microservices is just an excuse to build shit software.

*in environments and projects where they are a bad fit