The metaverse and crypto were entirely about some kind of future industry and society-changing application. "You don't see anything _now,_ but the future will be unrecognizable, trust me!"
Gen AI definitely has utility right now, and for some it's a lot of utility. But the hype around it is exactly the same, the hype is all around how "the future will be unrecognizable, trust me!"
So I agree that practically, Gen AI is utterly different from crypto/metaverse, it's a real thing with real value. But it's also attracting the exact same hucksters and they're kind of sucking all the air out of the room.
I think the biggest societal impact may be not “utility” at all but rather on the social side of things. The chatbots are nerfed right now because the big companies don’t want them “acting weird” and doing things like the infamous jealous girlfriend convo between Kevin Roose and “Sydney”. But the idea behind the movie Her is essentially demonstrable now, and people are going to deliver those experiences.
I think things are going to get really weird. The prospect that my teenage son might have a virtual girlfriend does not seem sci-fi at all. Economically speaking, will people pay to chat and sext with “people”? I think yes?
People keep saying that, but I don't see it. So far we have chat bots, and Copilot. Copilot is going to be in legal limbo for years until the license issues are solved. Chatting with bing is fun and all but I don't see the long term utility.
What is the utility right now? Which of my problems are solved?
* My company has a very large codebase, and I am not familiar with 99% of it. I can use an AI assistant like Sourcegraph Cody to explain parts of the codebase to me at a high level, and suggest areas where I should dive in to address my specific problem.
* If I am working with a language, library, or framework I have not used before, I can ask ChatGPT to explain how a certain function works, and provide some code examples. If I write some code an get unexpected results, I can paste my code and results into ChatGPT, and ask it to tell me what went wrong.
* Someone sends me a spreadsheet that specifies some business logic, and I want to transform that spreadsheet into a YAML file, and write some code to parse the YAML config and take some action based on user-supplied data. ChatGPT is pretty good at this.
In all of these cases, I have to take the AI output with a grain of salt, and may have to do some supplementary research or debugging. But that's also the case when I ask coworkers for help. Right now, I would say generative AI provides a small boost to my productivity, but I can see that boost growing larger as language models improve.
I do. I care about my problems and what it does for me. I regularly employ ChatGPT to help me solve arbitrary tasks from writing code, debugging code, learning Korean, and cutting writing time in half.
Gen AI definitely has utility right now, and for some it's a lot of utility. But the hype around it is exactly the same, the hype is all around how "the future will be unrecognizable, trust me!"
So I agree that practically, Gen AI is utterly different from crypto/metaverse, it's a real thing with real value. But it's also attracting the exact same hucksters and they're kind of sucking all the air out of the room.