Comment by pixelfarmer

> 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.