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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes, I actually think we can have pretty good guess looking at how the internet evolved. It's really not how it was envisioned in the 90s. A lot of people knew it was gonna be big of course, but they couldn't tell you how. There is the type of applications/services the internet enabled, and how do you actually make monetize the internet.
Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, etc all had different "takes" on how the internet was gonna be big and how they will monetize it. The actual services they provide are things that WAS correctly envisioned and was "known" in the 90s. I remember people talking about the "future where you could have":
- On-Demand video streaming service
- News, weather, and communication (email, IM, chat, video conference) services
- Commerce
You could go to videos from the 90s on YouTube and see many people (including Bill Gates himself) easily say "One day you'll be doing all your shopping online. You can watch any movie in the world in a second. You can chat with your loved ones around the world in video in real time and send and receive messages from them instantaneously whenever and whereever you like. Everyone familiar with computers and networks knew that future was possible. It was a matter of timeline and when the technology/cost curves would cross for it to work.
How you monetize that though wasn't exactly known/agreed on. Monetizing a commerce and paid services is straightforward, and you just need the technology to be ready for the scenario you wanted to achieve.
Google on the other hand put all their cards on Ads for example. Microsoft initially thought they can just sell the software to run email or hosting for a web services, but they also dabbled in Ads, paid services (cloud and otherwise)
Not sure what the similar verticals in AI will be. It's not Application vs Monetization. I think it's something else.
"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.
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.
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.
Yes, I actually think we can have pretty good guess looking at how the internet evolved. It's really not how it was envisioned in the 90s. A lot of people knew it was gonna be big of course, but they couldn't tell you how. There is the type of applications/services the internet enabled, and how do you actually make monetize the internet.
Google, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, etc all had different "takes" on how the internet was gonna be big and how they will monetize it. The actual services they provide are things that WAS correctly envisioned and was "known" in the 90s. I remember people talking about the "future where you could have":
- On-Demand video streaming service
- News, weather, and communication (email, IM, chat, video conference) services
- Commerce
You could go to videos from the 90s on YouTube and see many people (including Bill Gates himself) easily say "One day you'll be doing all your shopping online. You can watch any movie in the world in a second. You can chat with your loved ones around the world in video in real time and send and receive messages from them instantaneously whenever and whereever you like. Everyone familiar with computers and networks knew that future was possible. It was a matter of timeline and when the technology/cost curves would cross for it to work.
How you monetize that though wasn't exactly known/agreed on. Monetizing a commerce and paid services is straightforward, and you just need the technology to be ready for the scenario you wanted to achieve.
Google on the other hand put all their cards on Ads for example. Microsoft initially thought they can just sell the software to run email or hosting for a web services, but they also dabbled in Ads, paid services (cloud and otherwise)
Not sure what the similar verticals in AI will be. It's not Application vs Monetization. I think it's something else.