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.

> 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.

People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con.

Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily.

Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future.

Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingredients pretty often). She loves it.

This is where LLMs shine for regular people. She doesn't need it to create a 500k LOC turn-key baking tracking SaaS AWS back-end 5 million recipes on tap kitchen assistant app.

She just needs a bespoke one off check list.

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

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

Probably individual actors have different motivations, but let's spitball for a second:

- LLMs are genuinely a revolution in natural language processing. We can do things now in that space that were unthinkable single-digit years ago. This opens new opportunity spaces to colonize, and some might turn out quite profitable. Ergo, land rush.

- Even if the new spaces are not that much of a value leap intrinsically, some may still end up obsoleting earlier-generation products pretty much overnight, and no one wants to be the next Nokia. Ergo, defensive land rush.

- There's a non-zero chance that someone somewhere will actually manage to build the tech up into something close enough to AGI to serve, which in essence means deprecating the labor class. The benefits (to that specific someone, anyway...) would be staggering enough to make that a goal worth pursuing even if the odds of reaching it are unclear and arguably quite low.

- The increasingly leveraged debt that's funding the land rush's capex needs to be paid off somehow and I'll venture everyone knows that the winners will possibly be able to, but not everyone will be a winner. In that scenario, you really don't want to be a non-winner. It's kind of like that joke where you don't need to outrun the lions, you only need to outrun the other runners, except in this case the harder everyone runs and the bigger the lions become. (Which is a funny thought now, sure, but the feasting, when it comes, will be a bloodbath.)

- A few, I'll daresay, have perhaps been huffing each other's farts too deep and too long and genuinely believe the words of ebullient enthusiasm coming out of their own mouths. That, and/or they think everyone's job except theirs is simple actually, and therefore just this close to being replaceable (which is a distinct flavor of fart, although coming from largely the same sources).

So basically the mania is for the most part a natural consequence of what's going on in the overlap of the tech itself and the incentive structure within which it exists, although this might be a good point to remember that cancer and earthquakes too are natural. Either way, take care of yourselves and each other, y'all, because the ride is only going to get bouncier for a while.

Thing is, it's hard to predict what can be done and what breakthrough or minor tweak can suddenly open up an avenue for a profitable use-case.

The cost of missing that opportunity is why they're heavily investing in AI, they don't want to miss the boat if there's going to be one.

And what else would they do? What's the other growth path?

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 payrolls.

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.

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

Fake it till you make it.

> In other words --- pure greed.

It's the opposite; it's FOMO.

It's not just AI mania, it's been this way for over a decade.

When I first started consulting, organizations were afraid enough of lack of ROI in tech implementations that projects needed an economic justification in order to be approved.

Starting with cloud, leadership seemed so become rare, and everything was "us too!".

After cloud it was data/data visualization, then it was over-hiring during Covid, the it was RTO, and now it's AI.

I wonder if we will ever return to rationalization? The bellwether might be Tesla stock price (at a rational valuation).

US technocapitalism is built on the premise of technological innovation driving exponential growth. This is why they are fixated on whatever provides an outlook for that. The risk that it might not work out is downplayed, because (a) they don’t want to hazard not being at the forefront in the event that it does work out, and (b) if it doesn’t work out, nobody will really hold them accountable for it, not the least because everybody does it.

After the mobile and cloud revolution having run out of steam, AI is what promises most growth by far, even if it is a dubious promise.

It’s a gamble, a bet on “the next big thing”. Because they would never be satisfied with there not being another “big thing”, or not being prominently part of it.

It was the same with the cloud adoption. And I still think that cloud is expensive, wasteful and in the vast majority of cases not needed.

It's not "pure greed." It's keeping up with the Joneses. It's fear.

There are three types of humans: mimics, amplifiers, originators. ~99% of the population are basic mimics, and they're always terrified - to one degree or another - of being out of step with the herd. The hyper mimicry behavior can be seen everywhere and at all times, from classrooms to Tiktok & Reddit to shopping behaviors. Most corporate leadership are highly effective mimics, very few are originators. They desperately herd follow ('nobody ever got fired for buying IBM').

This is the dotcom equivalent of every business must be e and @ ified (the advertising was aggressively targeted to that at the time). 1998-2000, you must be e ready. Your hotdog stand must have its own web site.

It is not greed-driven, it's fear-driven.

They want to exfiltrate the customers' data under the guise of getting better "AI" responses.

No company or government in the EU should use this spyware.

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.