I’ve seen reports and studies that show products advertised as including / involving AI are off-putting to consumers. And this matches what almost every person I hear irl or online says. Regardless of whether they think that in the long-term AI will be useful, problematic or apocalyptic, nobody is impressed Spotify offering a “AI DJ” or “AI coffee machines”.
I understand that AI tech companies might want to promote their own AI products if they think there’s a market for them. And they might even try to create a market by hyping the possibilities of “AI”. But rebranding your existing service or algorithms as being AI seems like super dumb move, obviously stupid for tech literate people and off-putting / scary for others. Have they just completely misjudged the world’s enthusiasm for this buzzword? Or is there some other reason?
I don’t know if it’s AI specific or just connected devices that people are starting to avoid. I don’t want anything with the word “smart” in it. I don’t want anything that requires an app, and I try to avoid things that require an account. I think people are fucking finally figuring out that all this shit is designed to spy on you for profit, and will probably eventually require a subscription if it doesn’t already. It’s a bullshit business model. Make a fucking decent product, and sell it to people for a flat fee, and they’ll be your customers for life. Stop trying to be a data company, or a subscription company.
As for the second part of your question, companies are pushing it so hard because it’s like having a money printing press. They can turn a few months worth of work into an endless stream of money.
It’s just a modern version of “Fuzzy Logic”
Just dumb. In the case of the company i work for at least.
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OpenAI struck gold, NVIDIA followed suit, and everyone else bought shovels hoping to get investors even though they have no plans on striking gold (developing useful AI).
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Would you like to buy a timeshare to the moon? If we all buy, you’ll be able to sell your spot for 10x the price! Don’t wait! Spots are limited!
Nvidia is the biggest shovel seller out there.
We kinda need to adapt the saying now. When someone finds gold, you need to sell wood and iron for all the shovel makers that will show up.
Nvidia sells the hardware (shovels), but also develops portions of the software to make it run more efficiently, like OpenAI. Nobody else but Microsoft seems to be actually developing software, though AMD is slowly working towards having comparable performance.
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Hype brings investment money to the table. When an emerging technology appears, you can say we are looking to develop those technologies into our existing products and you will see a bump up in your share price.
After a few years of failed products and the hype dies for the next thing you can never mention the old hype but keep the bump in share price.
Think about 5-7 years ago, Blockchain was all the hype, 5-7 before then was Machine Learning and XaaS, before that was Big Data.
Yeah, investors kind of amplify hype. When there is hype, you will have some investors investing money.
If there’s investors investing money, it makes sense for other investors to try to invest first, so that their invested money gains value (the share price rises).
And then it becomes somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because suddenly you do have companies equipped with money to pursue that hype, which can feed back into the hype.But similarly, you’ll eventually reach a point where it does not live up to the inflated hype and then shareholders can just as well be extremely quick to pull out their money and amplify the crash.
Investors also know not every product will sell. So pad the bet and spread wide to increase your chances to score big.
The dumbest part about all of this is that the “AI” that’s currently building up all the hype is just machine learning
It’s simple. Because Microsoft can’t say that their operating system is garbage and quietly wants their users to switch to Linux
So you’re telling me the software developed by Microsoft is being used on Linux platforms to convince manufacturers using Linux to use Linux instead of Microsoft because Microsoft systems are bad?? Make it make sense dawg.
Wrong thread?
Two mains reasons:
Attracting investors
Attracting talented workers by signaling they are doing technical research
Also, people working in the industry might not even use those products. They want a cool job not a cool product
As a tech worker, it’s more towards attracting investors.
Venture capitalists and shareholders want to make money. Company executives want to give them eternally increasing profit. Simple as that.
It will kill us all or solve everything, step right up and place your bets! No ma’am, there is no third option to bet on, none at all I say.
AI is the new add driven model.
Everything that AI touches, ends up machine learning content.
AI DJ? I now have your name your email address and every single taste you have in music. As you use the app I will gain more insight into more music that you are or might be interested in.
That room was running around your house looking for socks and cables not to run over, also image processing on everything in your house. We know how big your house is they probably know how big my TV is.
They’re not just farming your email and text messages to figure out what to sell you they know at a core intimate level what you’re interests are.
They’re in for a rude awakening in a few years. All of this AI information gathering is a bubble. You have companies like anovo complaining that they can’t afford to host a single website. All this AI training is not cheap and the return on investment is not great after the initial plunge right?
Because it attracts shareholders
Money was already spent. The hype companies were backed by big capital in their early days. Now the people who provided that capital want to cash out and they want their winnings. So you will have AI shoved down your throat on every piece of media channel those people also own. AI is a hype term that appears periodically since before the 2000s. This is nothing new. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
LLMs are toys that sparkle for a brief moment. Their value is laughable compared to their cost.
No, they’re pretty much just dumb. In tech, this works along hype cycles where there’s gotta be some new thing all the fucking time, and it cures what ails ya and is perfect for every case. This mostly involves taking any actual merits of [new tech] and blowing them way out of proportion and context, making it the best thing since sliced bread. This invariably makes people invest because hype is more important than making sense. When the cycle for that particular tech winds down into the Trough of Disillusionment, a new one shows up.
Think like a venture investor.
A small chance of huge growth via new technology can have a big payoff. They expect most companies to fail and are more worried about missing an opportunity than losing money in a single bad investment.
Nobody is quite sure where AI technology will be in ten years, but if it’s big, it’s going to make people who got in early very rich. It doesn’t matter that it sucks now; the web sucked in 1995, but it made people who got in (and out) at the right time very rich.
A lot of business people also think that AI is a “force multiplier” meaning that if they use it they can get more done in less time. Anything that can do that is basically a money printer at the business level, which is why all these execs and companies are so excited about it.
The problem is it’s not or at least not reliably proven to be so. All these companies are jumping on board thinking “shove some AI in there and get 20% growth” when in reality there’s no backing behind it working like that. And that’s why a lot of customers are turned off, because from the consumer side, AI is just sloppy unoriginal junk. But on the business side they just see “Productivity is up” never mind that the productivity is garbage quality.
