Comment by Karrot_Kream

Comment by Karrot_Kream a day ago

The reason so many of these AI features are "horseless carriage" like is because of the way they were incentivized internally. AI is "hot" and just by adding a useless AI feature, most established companies are seeing high usage growth for their "AI enhanced" projects. So internally there's a race to shove AI in as quickly as possible and juice growth numbers by cashing in on the hype. It's unclear to me whether these businesses will build more durable, well-thought projects using AI after the fact and make actually sticky product offerings.

(This is based on my knowledge the internal workings of a few well known tech companies.)

petekoomen a day ago

That sounds about right to me. Massive opportunity for startups to reimagine how software should work in just about every domain.

Reply View 0 replies

HeyLaughingBoy a day ago

Sounds a lot like blockchain 10 years ago!

Reply View 2 replies

sanderjd a day ago

Totally. I think the comparison between the two is actually very interesting and illustrative.
In my view there is significantly more there there with generative AI. But there is a huge amount of nonsense hype in both cases. So it has been fascinating to witness people in one case flailing around to find the meat on the bones while almost entirely coming up blank, while in the other case progressing on these parallel tracks where some people are mostly just responding to the hype while others are (more quietly) doing actual useful things.
To be clear, there was a period where I thought I saw a glimmer of people being on the "actual useful things" track in the blockchain world as well, and I think there have been lots of people working on that in totally good faith, but to me it just seems to be almost entirely a bust and likely to remain that way.

Reply View | 0 replies
Karrot_Kream a day ago

This happens whenever something hits the peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle. The same thing happened in the social network era (one could even say that the beloved Google Plus was just this for Google), the same thing happened in the mobile app era (Twitter was all about sending messages using SMS lol), and of course it happened during Blockchain as well. The question is whether durable product offerings emerge or whether these products are the throwaway me-too horseless carriages of the AI era.
Meta is a behemoth. Google Plus, a footnote. The goal is to be Meta here and not Google Plus.

Reply View | 0 replies