Imagine your supplier effectively telling you that they don't even value you (and your money) enough to bother a real human.

They've gotten away with shipping garbage for years and still getting paid for it. They think we're all stupid.

I was just in a thread yesterday with someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was.

Everything about the conversation felt like talking to a true believer, and there's plenty out there.

It's the hopes and dreams of the Next Big Thing after blockchain and web3 fell apart and everyone is desperate to jump on the bandwagon because ZIRP is gone and everyone who is risk averse will only bet on what everyone else is betting on.

Thus, the cycle feeds itself until the bubble pops.

> In other words --- pure greed.

Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits.

These attempts to try to steer demand despite clear indicators that it doesn't want to go in that direction aren't just driven by greed, they're driven by abject incompetence.

This isn't pure greed, it's stupid greed.

It's not "fundamentally flawed". It is brilliant at what it does. What is flawed is how people are applying it to solve specific problems. It isn't a "do anything" button that you can just push. Every problem you apply AI to still has a ton of engineering work that needs to be done to make it useful.

I think on some level it is being done on the premise that further advancement requires an enormous capital investment and if they can find a way to fund that with today’s sales it will give the opportunity for the tech to get there (quite a gamble).

I have a feeling that Microsoft is setting themselves up for a serious antitrust lawsuit if they do what they are intending on. They should really be careful about introducing products into the OS that take away from all other AI shops. I fear this would cripple innovation if allowed to do so as well, since Microsoft has drastically fatter wallets than most of their competition.

> So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted?

> I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry.

Yes, perhaps, but many industries are built on a little bit of technology and a lot of stories.

I think of it as us all being caught in one giant infomercial.

Meanwhile as long as investors buy the hype it's a great story to use for triming payroll.

It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade.

It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - the same as how they've gotten to choose the winners and losers for the past two decades.

Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever.

If, however, AI ended up delivering and they missed the boat, they’re going to be held accountable.

It’s much less risky to just follow industry trends. It takes a lot of technical knowledge, gut, and confidence in your own judgement to push back against an industry-wide trend at that level.