I didn’t buy the hype of any of those things, but I believe AI is a going to change everything much like the introduction of the internet. People are dismissing AI because its code is not bug free, completely dismissing the fact that it generates PRs in minutes from a poorly written text prompt. As if that’s not impressive. In fact if you put a human engineer on the receiving end of the same prompt with the same context as what we’re sending to the LLM, I doubt they could produce code half as good in 10x the time. It’s science fiction coming true, and it’s only going to continue to improve.
Again, there were people just as sure about crypto as you are now about AI. They dismissed criticism because they thought the technology was impressive and revolutionary. That it was science fiction come true and only going to continue to improve. It's the exact same hype-driven rhetoric.
If you want to convince skeptics talk about examples, vibe code a successful business, show off your success with using AI. Telling people it's the future and if you disagree you have your head in the sand, is wholly unconvincing.
As someone who gleefully followed along as the Web3 hype train derailed, an important distinction is that crypto turns every believer into a salesperson, by design. There were some that were truly passionate about the potential applications for blockchain technology, but by and large they were drowned out by people who, having poured $10k into the memecoin of the week, wanted to see the price of that coin rise.
This doesn't feel like that. The applications of generative AI have become self-evident to anyone that's followed their rise. Specific applications of AI resemble snake oil, and there are hucksters who pivoted from crypto to AI, but the ratio of legit use cases to scams isn't even close.
If anything, the incentives for embellishment have flipped since crypto. VC-funded AI companies will dreamily fire press releases about AI taking us to Mars, but it doesn't have the pseudo-grassroots quality of cryptocurrency hype. The average worker is incentivized to be an AI skeptic. The rise of generative AI threatens workers in several fields today, and has already negatively impacted copywriters and freelance artists. I absolutely understand why people in those fields would respond by calling AI use unethical and criticize the shortcomings of today's models.
We'll see what the next few years hold. But personally, I foresee AI integration ramping up. Even if the models themselves completely stagnate from this point on, there's a lot of missing glue between the models and the real world.
You don't have to be able to vibe code an entire business from scratch to know that the technology behind AI is significantly more impressive than VR, crypto, web3 etc. What the free version of ChatGPT can do right now, not just coding; would've been unimaginable to most people just 5 years ago.
Don't people and companies using AI lazily to put out low quality content blind you to its potential as well as the reality of what it can do right now. Look at Google's VO3, most people in the world right now won't be able to tell you that it's AI generated and not real.