True story time. I was talking to a guy at $dayjob and he says he’s been talking with a third party company, whose solution we might buy. I asked him how the talks with them went and he said they were negotiating and I asked him how that was going.
He offhandedly said that he asked if and how they were using AI at all in their solution. I asked “Why did you ask about AI?”, since I was sort of curious what benefit he was looking for.
He said “Well, it’s not that I actually care about AI in their product, but if they don’t have any AI stuff, I can use that as leverage when negotiating the contract for a lower price.”
I was a bit astonished and he did kinda knowingly smile. He said “yea I know, I am part of the problem”. He also said “it’s also about taking a temperature on how ahead in technology the company is”.
I just wanted to share cause this is so insidious. Companies are asking each other about AI, despite the fact that (at least sometimes) nobody actually wants it! They are asking in order to use the lack of AI as leverage, which incentivizes companies to include AI in their offerings, not because it’s actually useful, but because it gives them leverage to raise prices!
This really makes AI seem more and more like a bubble.
Internet
Virtualization
Cloud
Blockchain
AI <- You are here
Quantum (coming 2027)Agree, but like the internet did completely change things, like way more than any of the other things on the list
You forgot ‘Big Data’
And ML
Not sure what point you’re trying to make, but all of those things you listed besides blockchain have revolutionized the world. I know this is a blanket “I hate everything about AI” community, and it is absolutely overhyped, but this is not some tech than will disappear.
All those things over-promised and under-delivered due to marketing.
Even the internet. Or should I call it the “Information Super-Highway”? The thing that was supposed to enlighten our entire civilization and unify the planet, ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity…
Best I can do is destroy the social fabric of civilization.
Maybe we’ll get lucky, and all our predictions about AI will be the opposite, too. That would mean a very positive change. Most likely, the expectations of worldwide poverty are too high, and with our luck, humanity will become just become extinct instead.
My point is the marketers and sales people will move on to quantum and we’ll never hear “AI” mentioned again.
quantumAI
My cousin is in college and apparently taking classes on AI. He’s trying to convince my uncle to let him program an AI agent for his company website so he won’t be “left behind.”
My uncle owns a gas station.
My local HVAC company has an “AI agent” answering the phones. It does not disclose that it is not a person. It was unable to complete the simple task of scheduling an appointment to have my HVAC system diagnosed. It refused to transfer me to a human who could. A human called me back later but I had already scheduled another company to come out.
A human called me back later but I had already scheduled
I hope you were sympathetic but firm when you mentioned why – and suggested you’d try them again so they knew there was hope if they ditched the broken agent. Let’s leave people with some hope! :-D
I was not. I just told them I found another vendor. If they can’t put 2 and 2 together and figure out what happened, that’s on them. Not my problem.
trying to convince my uncle
How much is Ai coursework is barely concealed proselytizing? The Ai course the shop is pushing on us is a cheesy seminar that apparently plays like a timeshare pitch.
How much is Ai coursework is barely concealed proselytizing?
Oh, I’m certain all of it is. He thinks that because I guess he knows how to use AI that he’s going to be some big entrepreneur. After hearing him talk about it, I told him that there was no future in AI and he needs to learn to code.
Two weeks later, he texted me with a question about Javascript, so I’m hoping things are going better.
My experience with AI at companies has entirely been solutions in search of problems. When you learn more about it you discover the employees aren’t asking for the new AI tool - instead some C level is pressuring their people to implement something.
Employees either don’t need it or already have access to the AI tools they find useful but the FOMO from the top is real. And the people at the top don’t seem to actually understand or care to understand the limitations of the tools because they have bought in to the pie in the sky promises from the Altmans and Musks of the world.
My company created a “team” to figure out how we can use AI.
If you need a focus group to find a use case, maybe we don’t need it?? Until AI can whip up accurate infrastructure drawings and wiring diagrams, I don’t give a fuck.
When my department is forced to watch a presentation on what COULD be possible, I always ask chatgpt some specific AV question (which Dante license do I need for X Y Z?) and post a screenshot of it giving me the wrong answer.
Until it’s right 100% of the time, I’m just not interested. It takes just as long to verify as it does to find the answer on my own
Stop me if this doesn’t make any sense at all but I’m not a proponent of AI I don’t really support it because of it’s associations and the goals of the people in charge of it. That said I will occasionally play with an AI just to see what it’s capable of and how it’s development is coming along because unfortunately I can’t just make the technology go away.
I’ve arrived at the conclusion that it’s pretty terrible for most things. I asked it how I could make my copy of Minecraft always open to a certain Port when I hit the open to LAN button.
It literally made up a jvm argument that wasn’t real and then later admitted that it just guessed.
My point is I’ll mess with it a little but it’s kind of a know your enemy thing.
One thing I do like about it is that it’s better at analyzing than generating which is a common theme. If I feed it a big long crash log it can usually tell me what happened reasonably well or enough that I don’t have to spend as much time f****** around digging through the logs, also if I’m getting obscure Windows errors it can generally comb through shitloads of Random microsoft support form b******* and point me in the right direction. I think the technology has uses it’s just that they’re different from what everyone is trying to use it for and that’s a real damn shame isn’t it
I will admit I use it occasionally, too. I use AutoCAD which can load LISP code but…I do not know how to write LISP. It can’t replace a real programmer but Chatgpt has made a bunch of little scripts for me that turn 30 second tasks into 1-second automations.
Same. The funny thing is the people in the group dont even like it. They’ve been using actual machine learning for decades so this bs is just a waste of time to them.
I will say ive given it many chances to help me out and its never once worked. Its always wasted far more time than its saved.
It maybe helped me on an excel macro once, but it was still wrong and I had to fix it anyways.
I’m sure it depends on what your actual goal is. I would never trust it to give me factual information but for 20-lines of LISP I can immediately test, it’s been pretty good.
The seems maybe very much like the .com boom and bust. Right?
.com boom and bust wasn’t established companies, it was tons of startups over flushed with cash who had no viable business models and the cash dried up.
this is far worse. the only light is that these massive data centers might make computing super cheap when the data is sold at rock bottom prices.
plenty of household names went down during dotcom, you don’t remember any of them because they went out of business, some of the ones that survived are only just now recovering to their dotcom-highs…
cough
IBM
cough
they’ve been a negative/stagnant growth company for over a decade…so consider what’s about to happen to their price again.
Except a thousand times worse when it pops. Not sure the stock market has ever been so heavily weighted to 7 companies and I’ve never known a single factor to account for so large a chunk of our GDP.
I think it may have been even larger but not by much.
The difference is the dot com bubble ended up with huge amounts of fibre infrastructure installed which was ultimately used (many years later).
This bubble will end up with huge data centres with obsolete GPUs which have massive water and power consumption burdens.
Funny enough, my first IT job was temp work doing Y2K updates at Williams Companies. They were Tulsa’s largest employer and were laying new fiber and lighting dark fiber. Never tied their sudden demise to to dotcom crash.
Still, I’d argue the AI bubble is a monster. 7 companies (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla) are holding up the stock market, all deeply into AI. Nvidia straight crashes on this bubble and we all know Telsa is monstrously overvalued.
We Haven’t Seen This Level of Market Concentration Since the Great Depression
…investment in information-processing equipment and software was only 4% of U.S. GDP for the first half of 2025, yet it also accounted for fully 92% of GDP growth over that period
Yikes!
Ah, yes.
Exactly like Cloud was.
Blockchain.
Search optimization. CSS. The various JS frameworks. Probably more that I want to ignore right now.
Throw it in your solution, you can charge more for it. Doesn’t matter if it improves anything or not.
Ok, but let’s go all the way back to “the internet” in general.
The .com bubble did eventually collapse though. So…
You can only use that as leverage if some companies legitimately want that.
The reason it’s being pushed even though nobody wants it is…drumroll defrauding investors!
Even if you’re not an AI company, you want AI in it to mislead investors of your own. Basically slapping AI on your branding, and nothing else, increases your stock value.
Just like adding “dotcom” to your business name increased it’s value. Until it didn’t.
9/10 people “investing” know it’s bullshit, they’re just gambling with other degenerates in a weird game of chair-circle or whatever the fuck that childhood gane was called.
our entire economy has been around facilitating speculation, because it “increases liquidity”, so now we have a nation of gamblers where noone wants to work…and why would they when work is punished
My company bought a blockchain company with the same reasoning. They divested in blockchain as soon as the fad ended.
The rich want the tech to progress to the point that their control of society can be automated as a layer of protection.
Yuuup. To corroborate your story, my friend was making a pitch deck for her start up and AI isn’t particularly useful for her product. She wanted me to help her draft some copy as a favor and when I gave her an already rose colored write up, she insisted I mention AI.
I just added “AI powered” to a couple bullet points and called it a day, but she’ll be lying through her teeth to get those contacts. Ah, capitalism. -_-
AI is such a broad term that I’m sure they have something that qualifies.
Yeah, somewhere in the pipeline I think they even have NLP so that’s sorta right. Ain’t an LLM but certainly AI, lol.
Oh wow, thanks for sharing. And buzzwords and this kind of marketing have a long tradition. I’d like to mention that generally it can be quite problematic if people are looking for the cheapest option and then they don’t really look at the features they need and if a solution aligns with the own business, but they look at some buzzwords instead. I mean you’ll end up with a HD-ready, AI enabled, Industry 5.0 and Web3.0 mobile-first process management solution that way. But probably the one from the shadiest company. I don’t think the suppliers are stupid. It mainly incentivises them to slap stickers on top and deceive their customers. Or sell a product which doesn’t fit.
