AI Hype Is Cooling – New survey

https://slack.com/blog/news/the-fall-2024-workforce-index-shows-ai-hype-is-cooling?nojsmode=1

by zer0tonin • 2 years ago

99 127 2 years ago

cj• 2 years ago

I'm the "IT guy" at our 30 person startup.

My 2024 stance is "buy every AI add-on and decide whether to keep it next year"

So our team has access to Enterprise ChatGPT, Gemini, Notion AI, Slack AI, and basically every AI add-on in every SaaS platform that offers it as an upsell (Github Copilot, ReadMe AI, etc).

2024 is the year of "I don't know what the hell these AI tools are going to be useful for, so let's buy them all"

2025 will be the year of "Ok, we spent $xxx on all these AI tools last year, is anyone actually using them?"

I predict we'll be canceling a lot of those subscriptions. Which all in cost us over $100/mo per employee.

fsndz3• 2 years ago

that's a nice strategy for a 39 person startup ! using the tools is indeed the only way to see what works and what doesn't.

rollinDyno• 2 years ago

This makes sense for the current add-on wave but expect the launch of independent AI platforms to increase in the coming year.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

I don't think this will happen whilst GPUs are so expensive and constrained.

You need to be extremely well capitalised and have a good answer about how to compete against the cloud providers as well as OpenAI, Anthropic etc.

seattleeng• 2 years ago

This is exactly how Ive seen things occur. It makes a lot of sense, given some tools are great new additions (coding especially), but others fall flat (IMO, search)

danpalmer3• 2 years ago

That's a nice idea but it sounds like you must be spending far above $100/m. Back of the envelope suggests you might be spending the equivalent of an additional salary, and in many companies that's a hard thing to justify without any proven value.

bfdm• 2 years ago

100/mo per employee, it says. Roughly 3k/mo, or 36k annualized.

djbusby2• 2 years ago

Exactly their point. 2024 is the experiment (which costs money)

2025 is the pick the winners and drop the losers.

And use money for a different experiment.

generic920342• 2 years ago

Someone in the company also might start to ask where the productivity explosion is.

bongodongobob9• 2 years ago

That sounds great. Where I work, the CIO has blocked access to all AI for "security reasons". Any advice on how to counter that claim? I don't even know how to approach it. It feels like a freight company refusing to use the new "train" for shipping because they are loud and big and scary.

adastra224• 2 years ago

Why? That seems like a sensible take tbh. You don’t want some other company having chat logs with all your internal code and strategic documents inside.

djbusby2• 2 years ago

Ask them the definition of using it securely. Ask what they need to see/know to allow a service to be added.

jhanschoo2• 2 years ago

Echoing what another commenter said, depending on your industry, the data you deal with, and competitive landscape, what your CIO said may be sensible. Note especially that parent commenter works at a small startup, where security posture is typically more lax, for good business reasons.

tim3333• 2 years ago

Locally hosted AI?

fsndz3• 2 years ago

I am not surprised at all. The excitement is receding in accordance with the hype cycle theory. People tried the tools and saw their worth and the limitations. This is actually good news, it means we are entering a moment of truth, a moment when transforming knowledge into productivity and profits becomes crucial ! (https://www.lycee.ai/blog/large-language-models-productivity...)

ghaff• 2 years ago

I sort of hate the Gartner hype cycle as a research tool but I think there's a lot of truth to it directionally.

fsndz3• 2 years ago

absolutely, directionally it is useful.

red-iron-pine5• 2 years ago

"first there is a massive market. then there is no market. then there is a market"

voidfunc• 2 years ago

The big winner for AI at the end of the day is going to be Microsoft and Microsoft-like companies that can integrate AI and Copilots into existing tools, with an understanding of how those tools are used by daily users and without significantly increasing prices.

The rest of it? Mostly useless.

hipadev232• 2 years ago

Incumbents (Google, Microsoft, Adobe) seem to broadly struggle at reasonable integration of AI. Just look at windows/github copilot compared claude desktop or cursor.

pphysch• 2 years ago

Huh? I would assume incumbent GitHub Copilot has way more (paying) users than all of Anthropic's B2C products combined. Is that wrong?

Dudelander• 2 years ago

I'm kind of shocked by this comment. Microsoft seems to be dominating the industry, with copilot having over 1.5 million users.

ethbr12• 2 years ago

The rub is that the last-mile owners (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook) can afford to ship last and still win.

Do people not use Apple Maps because it came out years after Google Maps?

thefz2• 2 years ago

What? Adobe's generative AI is nuts.

nicce• 2 years ago

The big winner for AI at the end of the day is going to be Microsoft and Microsoft-like companies that can integrate AI and Copilots into existing tools, with an understanding of how those tools are used by daily users and without significantly increasing prices.

Don't forget Nvidia...

01100011• 2 years ago

It feels like a lot of big companies will lose money on AI for a while since they need it to stay relevant but it doesn't seem to be generating all that much in profits yet.

red-iron-pine5• 2 years ago

so far the only, like ONLY, valid benefit i've gotten from Copilot and AI in the workplace is some basic syntax checking for scrips, and improved search features for internal documents.

The former is mostly a parlor trick, while the latter is a massive improvement over Confluence and Sharepoint's search. That's not so much AI win as it is how crappy their built-in search is.

asdev4• 2 years ago

who is actually making sustainable revenue solving a real problem using AI? I can only think of the foundational models(OpenAI, Gemini etc), coding helpers(Cursor, GH Copilot)

cadence-3• 2 years ago

It might not always be possible to directly translate it to revenue, but in my company, we started using an RAG system to help the Customer Support team answer inquiries. It replaced the old Knowledge Base articles search system, and it improved the number of processed inquiries by about 30%. This decreased customer support times and probably helped make customers happier, which is a pretty nice win, even if it would be pretty much impossible to attribute any revenue numbers directly to it.

asdev4• 2 years ago

is this custom built or are you using a third party system that integrates with Zendesk, Intercom etc?

dgfitz• 2 years ago

So a really knowledgeable, specific search engine without ads or a customer base.

I hope you don’t pay for that service, you could train and run it yourself in… a week?

soco• 2 years ago

My experience says, soon there will be a reduction in the company of the customer support jobs, bringing the customer satisfaction on par to before aka lower, but with slightly more money in the shareholders' pockets.

einpoklum• 2 years ago

At GE Healtchare, "AI", i.e. Neural Network simulation, is used as an optional PET scan image enhancement transformation (glossing over important details of what that actually means). Now, the revenue is from the scanner + software, but it's a contributor to revenue, and arguably sustainable.

Not a foundational model nor a coding helper.

asdev4• 2 years ago

I was speaking more to GenAI solutions, this is more traditional ML

briteside• 2 years ago

https://faraday.ai - conventional ML not GenAI

opdahl• 2 years ago

There are quite a bit of AI for academic researching tools out there that are generating quite a bit of revenue or being bought up by academic publishing companies. You also have dedicated copy writing and article writing tools that basically automate (read plagiarize) the entire academic writing process.

michaelbuckbee• 2 years ago

As categories:

- Language translation: is, in general, much better with the ML models than prior automated attempts.

- Internal search tools (GPT + all your internal docs, private)

- Voice-to-text transcription in lots of medical and medical adjacent fields. HN tends to be skeptical of this ("It's going to hallucinate diagnoses!"), but it has a lower error rate than traditional speech rec and human transcription. I met someone who built their own no-code speech to text for their partner's veterinary practice and saved them an hour a day of notetaking.

There's a bunch of businesses in all these areas.

asdev4• 2 years ago

- Internal search tools (GPT + all your internal docs, private)

the actual hard part of this which is searching for relevant stuff to feed the LLM, which it just formulates into a readable stuff has been around for years. vector databases have been around forever.

kenjackson2• 2 years ago

Can we please get voice-to-text/action using LLM for cars and home automation. Voice activated anything in a car is such a hassle, because you have to say exactly, "Hey car, turn the temperature to x degrees". You can't say, "Hey car, turn up the heat" Or "Hey car, more AC please". Or "Hey car, max cold".

Alexa in the home is much better now than it used to be, but still way worse than voice chat with ChatGPT.

neom• 2 years ago

Given what law firms are paying for CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters sure as heck are.

cadence-3• 2 years ago

It's nice to see that the hype is cooling. There will be more room to focus discussions on what's actually useful, and stop with the endless "I love it", vs. "I hate it", vs. "I fear it" discussions.

gradus_ad• 2 years ago

The only AI product I've found to be useful is ChatGPT and the like. Just chatting it up with a GPT, exploring ideas, getting feedback etc. All derivative products, including coding tools, have been unhelpful at best and actively harmful to productivity at worst.

dmafreezone• 2 years ago

ChatGPT is also frequently incorrect. It becomes obvious in some cases, particularly in areas you are an expert in.

Reminds me of a PG essay about a "Dunning-Kruger pass". [0]

    When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

To some extent we have already developed some filtering against Reddit et al to protect our bayesian priors, but many who lack those filters could suffer greatly from encountering the internet.

drcode• 2 years ago

Companies are hiring fewer people that understand a technology that enable companies to hire fewer people- News at 11.

bossyTeacher• 2 years ago

I am calling it. GPT-5 if it ever comes out will be the first sign to the layman and outsiders that we are officially and unambiguously on the downwards stage of the hype cycle. I don't see OpenAI and DeepMind going anyware but I suspect all the API wrapper companies will disappear in 2025

vrosas• 2 years ago

The API wrapper companies will likely limp along until the model market consolidates and they get their faces ripped off by skyrocketing prices, or the features they're selling get integrated into models/platforms themselves. I don't see why Zoom/Google Meet can't integrate a bot-less call recorder+summarizer and immediately put half of them out of business.

korkybuchek• 2 years ago

I don't see why Zoom/Google Meet can't integrate a bot-less call recorder+summarizer and immediately put half of them out of business.

Zoom at least has had this feature for a while on enterprise plans.

Wheatman2• 2 years ago

Well uh, I dont know if this is bad news or good news but GPT-5 might never be released, their "Orion" model seems to be barely better if not worse than GPT-4.

Here:https://the-decoder.com/openais-new-orion-model-reportedly-s...

m3kw92• 2 years ago

It’s cooling but that’s because the next APi for flagship models haven’t shipped in a while. Every frontier co is on their .5 gen right now.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

There have been rumours [1] coming out from one of top frontier companies that they have a hit a wall with the existing technology. They simply can't just throw more data at the problem and expect generational advances.

Which means just like the last ML/AI/DS hype cycles we will be going through a winter until the next research breakthrough is invented.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1go6dq1/a_leak...

m3kw92• 2 years ago

I never put much stock on internet rumours. Way too much noise to waste time on it.

saomcomrad56• 2 years ago

Just in time for crypto hype season!

dmezzetti• 2 years ago

trough of disillusionment?

debacle• 2 years ago

Maybe part of the problem is most of the people claiming to be "AI experts" are riding the wave but don't really have much to offer.

My company was recently offered a $5k/mo package that would "supercharge our sales with AI." I don't think the presenter had anything material to offer besides some very basic workflow integrations that anyone who is using AI in their day to day has (mostly) already identified.

Apocryphon• 2 years ago

So... what becomes of the tech industry when we run out of hype fads? Two more years of stagnant hiring? It's good that interest rates are starting to lower again, at least.

threeseed3• 2 years ago

a16z are pushing that the Trump presidency will ignite a new wave of VC-led crypto growth.

Exactly what we've all been wanting.

aegypti• 2 years ago

Did anything novel ever come out of people integrating on demand UI into chat & conversations, or is it still in a sort of “low-code” use case space?

coldtea• 2 years ago

A lot of yachts were bought by AI vendors, does that count for a novel development?

MBCook8• 2 years ago

The sad thing is all the damage it’s done in the meantime.

I just saw a mention about how a homework help company called Chegg has had their stock drop 99% because everyone is just using ChatGPT.

They were a real functioning company, with hundreds or thousands of employees and contractors. All of whom are basically going to be laid off because some company burned through a bunch of VC money to lure everyone away with “the new thing“.

All the artists who lost jobs or commissions. All the companies who ended up wasting a ton of time trying to build AI or integrate AI features that aren’t actually useful. And maybe they’ll end up in a product in two years and by then no one will care or want them.

All the electricity, the silicon, the water for cooling, the new data center is being built that won’t be needed.

Just tons and tons of waste everywhere.

ChatGPT is neat. For all we know we’re near a local maxima of what we’re capable of achieving without another completely new approach that will take 10 or 15 years to figure out. There’s no proof that the acceleration and capabilities we’ve seen over the last 2 to 3 years will continue like that.

I know my company has been asked about adding AI into The main product I work on. I don’t see any benefit. I’ve been told when they ask the customers what it would do for them, they can’t say either. But they seem to have been trained to ask for it by the hype.

Remind me of all the nonsense about chat bots being integrated into every company’s webpage five or six years ago. They’re not helpful. But they were the thing.

ChatGPT has some uses, but is also way more expensive/wasteful.

I hope the hype moves on fast. I’d like this stuff that shakes out to stick around but what’s going on right now is just way too wasteful for my taste.

Feels like almost everyone is trying to build the biggest Z-Ray they can because they’ve been told it’s an amazing discover. No one actually knows what it is, or how to build one, but that hasn’t stopped trillions of dollars from being poured into it. And if we get there, it may not be worth anywhere near what was paid.

xtreme• 2 years ago

Chegg wasn't a victim — it was a middleman profiting from locked-up educational content and exploiting students’ needs. ChatGPT didn't "lure" users; it provided a superior, accessible alternative, democratizing learning rather than hiding it behind paywalls. The argument against AI due to resource usage is selectively blind to the inefficiencies of legacy systems like Chegg. Calling this hype is like dismissing the internet as a fad — it’s a failure of imagination. Disruption always displaces incumbents, but clinging to outdated, exploitative models is far worse than embracing a tool that genuinely empowers users.

demaga• 2 years ago

The difference here is that Chegg was actually profitable. It is still unknown if OpenAI will be.

StableAlkyne• 2 years ago

Chegg felt predatory.

They had no real original content of their own, just worked solutions to homework problems they pulled from textbooks. They were good at SEO and would appear at the top. You clicked on it because it lied to you: showing you part of the content you wanted. Just enough for the search engine preview. That probably boosted them further, wasting more time by others tricked by the same fake results.

To see the rest of the answer, they wanted you to pay money and hope it was what you wanted. Who would subscribe to that other than students desperate for homework answers?

Then ChatGPT comes in without any of the scammy tactics. Sure, it's often wrong, but so are Chegg and Quora.

bobsondugnut• 2 years ago

ChatGPT is neat. For all we know we’re near a local maxima of what we’re capable of achieving without another completely new approach that will take 10 or 15 years to figure out. There’s no proof that the acceleration and capabilities we’ve seen over the last 2 to 3 years will continue like that.

Two issues here:

1) we are only about ~10 years into the deep learning boom

2) we've seen deep learning scale with compute over this 10 years, not only over the last 2-3 years.

It could be we've reached the end of the road for NLP, no one really knows. But generally we see breakthroughs in lockstep with big jumps in compute capability (typically, GPU releases, occasionally with architecture changes).

tim3333• 2 years ago

... local maxima ... new approach that will take 10 or 15 years ...

I was listening to the recent interviews with Sam Altman and the Anthropic guy who are familiar with current research and they are very not like that. It's more wow we've got so much to build, AGI in a couple of years. (For it seems to me a rather limited version of AGI - more can code well rather than can fix your plumbing.)

MBCook8• 2 years ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-go...

Yeah, we don’t know for sure. But it seems like there are signs the easy gains may be over.

bongodongobob9• 2 years ago

What you're describing is the opposite of hype. You're describing a better product that displaced less effective/valuable products. Should I be feeling sad for Google because I use GPT more than their search engine? At the end of the day, I want the most effective tool.

MBCook8• 2 years ago

But we don’t know that.

One product worked and made money.

The other is (effectively) being dumped on the market by VCs in hopes of being a valuable unicorn.

It may never turn a profit.

My argument is that that VC bet on something that may not work out may have destroyed lots of real jobs. It wasn’t harmless, even if you ignore all the other externalities about resource usage.

rlt• 2 years ago

I just saw a mention about how a homework help company called Chegg has had their stock drop 99% because everyone is just using ChatGPT.

I don’t understand, this seems like the opposite of an example of “hype” causing damage. These customers found a better/cheaper alternative.

MBCook8• 2 years ago

A bunch of people are out of a job from a VC funded thing that may be gone in year for all we know.

There are tons of business that probably went through this.

kenjackson2• 2 years ago

Exactly. Homework is one of the best areas for ChatGPT. My daughter uses it for French -- and while I'm sure its probably sometimes wrong (I actually don't speak French), it has helped my daughter to a 99% so far in her class. She considers it her own private tutor. It generates quizzes for her, explains not only what the answer is, but why she probably answered the way that she did -- the number of times my daughter has said, "Oh, now that makes sense!" has been plenty.

userbinator2• 2 years ago

I've already seen enough of the drive-by PRs of hallucinated bugfixes and people putting comments through an LLM to "make them more professional" while also changing the meaning completely, to have been completely turned off the idea of using LLMs for anything that requires precision and reliability.

On the other hand I think arts and entertainment is where AI will likely still survive scrutiny, as imprecision is tolerated reasonably.

sva_• 2 years ago

a homework help company called Chegg uwu

That's a very charitable take on that site. I'd call it a site where people pay money for solutions to assignments they can't be assed to complete themselves.

chomp• 2 years ago

Agree on this, wife is a professor at a local college and the loss of Chegg will not be mourned. Honestly, AI at least can provide predictive text that might send the student down a path of realization. Chegg… is not useful for this.

red-iron-pine5• 2 years ago

aye Chegg is cancer, no RIP here

louiskottmann• 2 years ago

I think the upside is that we stop spending limited human time on mundane/easy things and focus on higher-value pursuit.

Because you can no longer be a cheap artist, because you can no longer help students on easy problems en masse, because family businesses no longer need a webmaster.

That's a step in the right direction, maybe even towards UBI.

On growth, I disagree that we reached the plateau already. We won't fundamentally change things but larger context windows, speed, compute and cost? Obviously.

That in itself is a major evolution.

It looks like it is fading out of hype maybe, but that's just like all things. LLMs aren't going anywhere, just like Rails got version 8 out and it's better than ever.

edanm• 2 years ago

As others have pointed out, some of your examples are very bad, because they're the opposite of hype - they're companies that innovated and created a better product by leveraging new technology. This gave actual consumers a better, cheaper option, as judged by the consumers themselves (who are the judges that matter).

You express a lot of concern that these are just "VC pumped up companies" or something, as if that negates the technology. But it doesn't! The technology has already been developed because of these VC investments, and much of it is public.

Moreover, even if these companies go out of business tomorrow and aren't replaced, having years of consumers paying less money and getting a better product is a good unto itself. Yes, a company that made something inferior went out of business in the process - but if, after the big companies are shut down, there really is somehow no alternative - a new company based on the old method can always start again.

I just don't understand how you can spin as bad the idea that VCs are spending billions on unprofitable companies, meaning that they are spending billions that go straight into either innovation, or consumer's pockets. Who loses out here except for the VCs?

And while I have empathy and respect for people who lose their jobs, companies going out of business is an everyday occurrence. We should wish it only happened because better-for-consumers solutions came along.

thefz2• 2 years ago

All the electricity, the silicon, the water for cooling, the new data center is being built that won’t be needed.
Just tons and tons of waste everywhere.

I worry about this not just for AI, but in general. That's capitalism right there, profit now - who cares later. And I am becoming radicalized against it.

ratedgene• 2 years ago

To be honest, AI is very much still in its discovery/explore phase.

disqard• 2 years ago

Is that also the "F*** Around" phase?

IMO, the "Find Out" is at least 1-2 years away.

kylecazar• 2 years ago

The hype is self-fulfilling. We say it's going to drastically impact everything, and then we rush to build it into our products and slap it all over the marketing materials. Enough people do this simultaneously, and it's drastically impacted everything.

stephen_g• 2 years ago

Yes, but it's drastically impacted everything in a different way that was promised... It was supposed to be revolutionary, to usher in whole new unheard-of levels of productivity, but at the end of the day the experience with a lot of these AI tack-ons for a lot of end-users is that they haven't been very useful...

neilv• 2 years ago

Nearly half (48%) of all desk workers would be uncomfortable admitting to their manager that they used AI for common workplace tasks. The top reasons for workers’ discomfort are 1) feeling like using AI is cheating 2) fear of being seen as less competent and 3) fear of being seen as lazy

First, I love that so many are uncomfortable, and that there are limits to the LLM cheating frenzy.

Second, I wonder whether there are additional big reasons (perhaps conflated with the above reasons):

* Not wanting to be seen as performing low quality work.

* Not wanting to suggest that their job can be replaced by AI tools.

* Not wanting to get caught leaking company IP or client/customer/partner data to various services.

* Not wanting to attract attention to possible copyright infringement or plagiarism scandal by LLM or other model (whether the company has rules about that, or not).

userbinator2• 2 years ago

2) fear of being seen as less competent

Guess how you'll be seen when you get called out for pretending an AI hallucination was your own work. I've seen it happen a few times already.

hi_hi2• 2 years ago

The problem for me with all these HypeTech's is they appear to promise something valuable that is always just out of reach.

With Crypto it was the idea of micro payments. I want to pay to read news articles, or watch a movie, or tip someone I value online, but I don't want to sign up to some monthly subscription or give over my card details. It seemed to offer a viable alternative to the advertising economy which drives everything now.

With LLMs it was the idea that I no longer have to trawl through marketing websites or endless social media posts to find the nugget of information I'm interested in. As a dev, I shouldn't have to care about responsive designs or tech stacks or accessibility or versions of node libraries, all to provide a website. Instead just pump the data directly to the AI and call it a day.

The 2 concepts could even work together so my "original thoughts" can be monetised so I can be paid royalties for my "art", like musicians are today.

davidclark• 2 years ago

As a dev, I shouldn't have to care about responsive designs or tech stacks or accessibility or versions of node libraries, all to provide a website.

This sounds like, “As a carpenter, I shouldn’t have to care about types of wood, or saws, or cuts, or ergonomics, all to make a chair.”

geoduck14• 2 years ago

This sounds like, “As a carpenter, I shouldn’t have to care about types of wood, or saws, or cuts, or ergonomics, all to make a chair.”

I've sat on plenty of couches where the person who made it didn't care - so there is probably a world where this makes sense

hi_hi2• 2 years ago

Nope, thats not the point I was trying to make.

What if you weren't making a chair, but a hammock. They can both do the same thing, but are very different approaches and requirements.

Same with websites. They are a medium for conveying information. You don't need (traditional) websites or apps to do that. I can even ask for information and receive information completely independently of a website.

The only reason devs need to care about all these things is because of the medium being used.

desireco42• 2 years ago

I don't think it is at all, it is just shaping into different forms. A lot of AI solutions are trivial still and we are long way from sophisticated ones.

I think people affected, which is most of us, are really hurting and want this to be true.

ethbr12• 2 years ago

At the end of the day, AI is integration.

If it's not grounded in the right, updated contexts or provided tools to interact with the apps a user cares about... it's a glorified chatbot.

I expect what we'll see in the next 5 years for enterprise adoption is progress on both those fronts.

And by progress, I mean "supports interactions with that VB 6 app that's still a critical piece of a company's workflow." (Or SAP, Salesforce, Epic, etc.)

xnx• 2 years ago

NVDA stock seems like a reasonable proxy for measuring AI hype. I'm not seeing cooling right now.

AI Hype Is Cooling – New survey

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