Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
In the late 90&#x27;s I got a Master&#x27;s degree, specializing in neural networks.  This caused me to learn about the hype cycle in AI, and since then I have seen it continue.  Remember Watson, IBM&#x27;s AI technology that was going to drive its growth?  IBM got lots of press by making computers that could play chess and Jeopardy, which seemed impressive to people at the time, but they never found a way to make money from it.  &quot;AI winter&quot; is the term for the trough of the AI hype cycle.<p>Note that every &quot;AI summer&quot; prior to this one has produced something useful, just never all that world-changing compared to people&#x27;s expectations.  Most people think that if it can BS (excuse me, generate convincing text), then it can do lots of other jobs.  Well, in previous AI summers, people thought that if it can play chess, or answer Jeopardy questions, it could do many other things that it turned out, it could not do (or could not do well enough).<p>For that matter, the ability to do math, at one time, was thought of as a sign of great intelligence.  But, it turned out that computers could do math, long before they could do anything else.  Our intuition about, &quot;if it can do this, soon it will be able to do that&quot;, is not very good.<p>I have heard ChatGPT described as a better autosuggest, which sounds about right.  It&#x27;s not that autosuggest isn&#x27;t useful, it can be very useful, but it&#x27;s not a thing that is going to change the world, and the jobs which it will automate are neither numerous, nor very well paid even now.<p>If you&#x27;re trying to pump that VC hype machine for $$, though, cryptocurrency is not going to work anymore, so they need something.