We all know about the Generative AI hype so I won’t introduce it here. We also know the criticisms of GenAI so I won’t repeat it here.
I’ve met many people who are against AI (creatives) and people who love it (family members who are LinkedIn types).
The latter types tell me I should post AI slop for my small business assuming it’s not suicidal. And that I should have ChatGPT paraphrase my emails assuming it’s not a prvacy hazard.
However, the GenAI hype made me realize one thing: GenAI isn’t the future. Rather, it’s a plea for desperation from a mature tech industry hungry for growth.
This Hacker News thread gives a good analogy: people who witnessed the internet and smartphone boom want the next big boom to milk the profits.
With the internet and mobile booms, consumers were interested in the new technology. I remember being a pre-teen wanting a Blackberry just to have a browser everywhere. Today’s late-20s me, already with a few grays doesn’t feel the same about AI.
Both telecom and tech companies had growth from the internet and smartphone boom. But in a neoliberal world, enough is never enough.
Instead, before the COVID-19 pandemic, venture capitalists started hyping Web3 and telecom companies started hyping 5G. Why? Both were hungry for growth after mobile plateaued.
While 5G is a reasonably successful, albeit boring mobile upgrade, Web3 is mostly a dud. We don’t live in a crypto world. At most, crypto is just another alternative asset class for the rich and Robinhood gamblers.
Unlike Web3, Big Tech is embracing GenAI. Why? If I were to guess:
-
We can hire less engineers and have AI do the rest
-
(For some companies) We can generate content to show as many ads as possible
-
To maintain control of the population and instill a Big Tech government
While GenAI has its uses, it’s not exactly profitable if you aren’t Nvidia. Nvidia will sell a lot of GPUs while everyone else loses money.
The funny part is, the Big Data hype of the early 2010s said if we collect as much data as possible, we can “make better decisions.” We scraped the whole web, yet here we are with hallucinations. “Make better decisions” my butt. Not to mention big data has always been a privacy risk.
Generative AI can be useful, and while I’m not an AI expert, we need small, purpose-built models to achieve a certain task. We can’t destroy Earth just to allow Big Tech to pirate the entire web. If an AI doesn’t know something, it shouldn’t hallucinate and make up information. It should say “I don’t know.”
Funny enough: I grew up hating Big Telecom just to see Big Tech become much worse. Big Telecom might withhold an affordable, unfiltered fiber connection from us. But Big Tech will withhold basic civil rights to show us more ads.
And as bad of a CEO Carly Fiorina was, she destroyed HP. Yet modern tech CEOs make Fiorina look like Steve Jobs. At least she didn’t destroy democracy.