I think it's an apt analogy. The Internet (and the web) was definitely good tech that is still used. Artificial Intelligence (or maybe more broadly, data science or _statistics_) is good tech that will still be used.
But chatbots in all the things? That will definitely collapse. I am interested to see what cream rises to the top out of all this and if we'll see an actual bubble burst like we did then.
I've been thinking about this recently with internet comments on here, reddit, etc. There are very few topics on which I'd consider myself an expert, but whenever one comes up, the "top" comment (often something contrarian/snarky) is always significantly incorrect.
Some people here are confused. Kindness towards people doesn't preclude you from being assertive. It doesn't preclude you from being a shrewd negotiator. It doesn't preclude you from provide feedback to an employee who needs to improve performance. It doesn't preclude you from laying off an employee.
A bit of short-term thinking, though. Even if companies _right now_ can treat applicants like crap, they probably shouldn't. I'd rather have an applicant accept an offer because they want to, not because they have to. They'll care more about the work and are less likely to flee.
While it's not fair, what I've settled on is this: if they can't spend for in-house recruiting, they probably can't afford me. This is based on ~20 years of this consistently happening. Again, not fair, but I have limited time to do job searching and empirically 3rd party recruiters have always hit a dead end.
With all the hallucinating (or "bullshitting") going on, it's hard to imagine LLMs working well for query generation. But hey, we're _very_ early days for all of this.
I think perhaps their current usage isn't optimized yet. I'm not sold on people chatting with a model as the best UX. Maybe some abstraction on top of this interaction
This reminds me of a time I was at a company using a BI tool for dashboarding. The numbers weren't making much sense to me, so I looked at the query building tool. I couldn't tell for the life of me if a part of the query was doing an inner join or left join. The business analyst who built the dashboard had no idea either.
It turned out that it was doing a left join when the intent was an inner join, and the data being shown was an order of magnitude higher than it should have been. This is when I lost all faith in these kinds of abstraction layers on top of SQL targeting people who don't actually know SQL.
So I am at a big tech company right now so I did the riddle thing at one point, but I'm out of the game so to speak and don't have the time for it anymore.
As far as having two kids goes---yeah, that's exactly the point of leet coding tests. If you don't have the time or energy to waste on mastering pointless exercises, you won't have time and energy to work 60-80 hour weeks. They want to filter out people with adult responsibilities, and adult problems.
One thing I have been suspicious of with these tests is exactly this... it is effectively an age discrimination loophole. Having free time to practice riddles is a decent proxy for how young you are.
My experience in big tech is that the product managers, engineers, and designers behind these things do actually care, but what they care about is "making impact" so they can get promoted. Right now, generative AI features == "impact."
I'm sure there are great applications for LLMs, really. But can we stop just putting minimal wrappers around ChatGPT and trying to cram it into everything?