The new “AI” hype is everywhere and people are predicting everything from end of humanity to economic collapse. Let us pause and think?
Hype cycles get rapidly amplified with social media. Humans are designed to over-react to threats (better safe than sorry) and social (all?) media amplifies this 100X. We saw that in COVID. We really did not understand the nature of the of the spread and neither did we think through all the consequences of suspending civil liberties. Even talking about alternative approaches like “herd immunity” was politically radioactive.
We also over-reacted on blockchain. Everyone from IBM to our politicians were claiming that all kinds of problems will be fixed with blockchain. Millions of dollars were invested in these hype technologies. Let’s not talk even about crypto.
Are we all over-reacting on these new transformer models? 90% of people in India will probably see no effect. For us in the IT bubble, we will continue to see more hype cycles based on low-interest rates, creating mostly useless technology to create more useless technology. Will be fun to see how this unfolds.
rightly said…these are like fashion fads, food tastes,movie heriones,etc., but pre and during the hype lots of brokers make money and so they hate FOSS spriit
It is like new IPO where brokers or operators make money…but fixed fee advisors dont care
Yet, despite substantial investments, economic impacts remain minimal. Using difference-in-differences and employer policies as quasi-experimental variation, we estimate precise zeros: AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation, with confidence intervals ruling out effects larger than 1%.
I was speaking to a former content marketer just today (former, because, well the work simply isn’t there), and they said, there’s been a dramatic change in online sales / marketing post ChatGPT. Their email list of 3000 content creators has gone progressively silent since 2023. Unsure if it is quantifiable, but anecdotally seems like ghost writing / content marketing has taken a hit, if nothing else.
They say their “entire job” (to me, this claim sounded like an exaggeration) is now totally redundant / fully automate-able with “Browser Use” and/or “Agentic Browsers”.
They also pointed out that companies like Grammarly (popular among content creators) might also be feeling the heat.
