Ask HN: Is it all becoming ChatGPT now?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44142007

4 6 1 year ago

news.ycombinator.com

barrenko• 1 year ago

Yes. Next question.

FWIW… Tech fads used to be pretty limited to tech circles. You would be bombarded for a few months by content about this or that on HN and elsewhere without ever hearing about it on the subway or at a dinner. Crypto kind of crossed the line at some point, but it is still a niche thing. ChatGPT and that whole ML-marketed-as-AI thing, on the other hand… it is everywhere.

"Get rich quick" schemes are somewhat attractive to the masses but nothing seems to beat those new "don't do the work you are paid for" schemes.

eddythompson802• 1 year ago

I don't if I agree. Crypto, metaverse/vr, wearables, 3d printing, smart homes (iot), gig apps, smart assistants (the ChatGPT pre-alpha version), etc are all examples of fads that spanned tech and mainstream culture.

Sure, the NoSQL fad or the Rust craze didn't spill into pop culture, because that wouldn't make sense. Even something like html5/modern web while it had tremendous impact on pop culture and what the mainstream expectation of a website is like in 2025 vs 2006, the mainstream culture never really cared or commented on it for obvious reasons. The most it got is someone saying "something something, Steve Jobs was right about Flash, something something, html5, the web"

I'm NOT saying that AI/LLM are like the hype for wearables or the metaverse. Not at all. Just point that spills from tech into mainstream culture are common, they just have to make sense. tech impacts the internet, and the internet impacts mainstream culture.

bruce511• 1 year ago

Certainly there are lots of fads that went mainstream then flittered away. 3D TV to name but one. VR seems to be another. Generally categorized as "solutions looking for problems".

Crypto falls into that camp (it solves some problems for a small subset, notably criminals, but relies on 'bigger fool' ideas to appeal to the man in the street.)

On the other hand some fads are society changing. Phones being one. PCs in general being another. (I'm old enough to remember a time when all records etc were on paper.) Inagjbe z life without Visicalc (or Excel.)

AI is here to stay. But remember how the internet was hyped in the 90s? Sure it'll change the world, but it's too early to predict how or when. But clearly we've entered a new era and if will be interesting to see how it plays out.

It has very obvious limits - but the nature of every hype cycle is to ignore those limits and predict grandiose futures. (The phone was supposed to kill the PC, then the tablet was etc.) But it's only by trying it everything that we can find out for sure, what those limits are.

Ask HN: Is it all becoming ChatGPT now?

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